Argentina joins OpenAI's Stargate project with a 500MW data center (www.bnamericas.com)

OpenAI and energy/infrastructure firm Sur Energy have signed a letter of intent to build the first Stargate data center in Latin America: a mega 500 MW facility in Argentina as part of a proposed US$25 billion project. Stargate is OpenAI’s broad infrastructure push (initially floated as up to US$500 billion in the U.S. with backers like SoftBank, Oracle and MGX) to secure large-scale cloud capacity for AI. The Argentina build will be executed via a joint venture with an unnamed international cloud developer, structured under Argentina’s Investment Incentive Scheme (RIGI), and OpenAI has committed to buying the center’s capacity. Few implementation details or timelines have been disclosed. Technically and strategically this is significant: 500 MW of continuous capacity is on the scale of multiple hyperscale AI campuses and signals major regional expansion of concentrated training/inference compute outside the U.S. It leverages Argentina’s renewable-energy potential (and even explored nuclear options in Patagonia) to meet AI’s heavy power needs, promising jobs, investment and lower-latency services for Latin American developers and users—Argentina is already a fast-growing ChatGPT market. The announcement raises questions about grid impact, sustainability, local data sovereignty and the unnamed cloud partner’s role, but marks a clear step toward decentralizing hyperscale AI infrastructure into Latin America.