OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites (openai.com)

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five new U.S. Stargate AI data center sites that push the consortium’s planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years—on a path to meet their $500 billion / 10‑gigawatt commitment by the end of 2025. Three Oracle-partnered sites (Shackelford County, TX; Doña Ana County, NM; a forthcoming Midwest site) plus a possible 600 MW Abilene expansion can deliver more than 5.5 GW; two SoftBank‑backed sites (Lordstown, OH and Milam County, TX) will scale to ~1.5 GW within 18 months. The selection screened 300+ proposals from 30+ states and is expected to create 25,000+ onsite jobs and many more across U.S. supply chains. Technically, the buildout is significant because it brings large-scale, cloud-native GPU capacity online quickly—Oracle has begun delivering NVIDIA GB200 racks into the Abilene flagship on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and OpenAI is already running early training and inference workloads. The partnerships combine infrastructure design, renewable-backed power (SB Energy), and hyperscale cloud operations to enable faster deployment, improved cost efficiency, and broader access to high‑performance compute—accelerating research timelines, increasing demand for next‑gen accelerators, and shaping regional energy and workforce planning for AI at scale.