OpenAI revealed plans Tuesday to build six large computer facilities across the country, adding to its current Texas location as part of a massive $500 billion spending plan that President Donald Trump highlighted earlier this year.
The company behind ChatGPT is working with Oracle and Softbank through a partnership called Stargate to construct these new sites. Two more will go up in Texas, with additional locations planned for New Mexico, Ohio, and another Midwest state that hasn’t been named yet.
The biggest project sits in Abilene, Texas, where city leaders say the development is changing their old railroad community. Oracle officials who toured the eight-building site said it’s already set to become the world’s largest computer cluster for artificial intelligence work once construction wraps up. The complex will house hundreds of thousands of specialized computer chips.
Sam Altman from OpenAI admitted that most people don’t think about what happens behind the scenes when they use ChatGPT. He and Clay Magouyrk, Oracle’s new co-chief, talked about their efforts to limit environmental damage in this dry part of West Texas, where temperatures reached 97 degrees Tuesday.
“We’re burning gas to run this data center,” Altman said, though he noted that Stargate hopes to use different power sources as the project grows.
The Texas facility needs roughly 900 megawatts of electricity to run all eight buildings and their computer chips. One building is already working, and a second that the executives visited Tuesday is almost done. Each equipment rack holds 72 of Nvidia’s GB200 chips, which handle the most demanding artificial intelligence tasks. Each building should contain about 60,000 of these chips.
Residents have mixed reactions to the OpenAI project
Not all residents are pleased because of the facility’s water and power requirements. The city’s water reservoirs were about half-full this week. People must follow a twice-weekly outdoor watering schedule, alternating days based on whether their house numbers are odd or even.
The cooling system needs one million gallons from the city water supplies for its initial setup.
Shaolei Ren, a University of California, Riverside professor who studies environmental effects of artificial intelligence, said the closed-loop cooling system shows developers care about local water supplies. But he noted these systems need more electricity, which means more indirect water use through power generation.
Most residents first heard about Stargate when Trump announced it after returning to office in January. Originally planned for cryptocurrency mining, developers changed and expanded their plans for the artificial intelligence boom that ChatGPT started.
The partnership said it was investing $100 billion initially, possibly reaching $500 billion, to build large data centers and power systems for AI development. OpenAI recently signed a deal to buy $300 billion worth of computing power from Oracle, a major gamble for the San Francisco company that began as a nonprofit.
OpenAI and Oracle brought reporters and politicians, including Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, to tour the site Tuesday for the first time.
Cruz called Texas “ground zero for AI” because anyone building data centers wants “abundant, low-cost energy.”
Of the five other Stargate projects announced Tuesday, Oracle will work with OpenAI on one in New Mexico’s Doña Ana County and another in Shackelford County, Texas. The company also plans one in the Midwest.
Softbank has started construction on two more in Lordstown, Ohio, and Milam County, Texas.
These projects help OpenAI reduce its dependence on Microsoft, which was previously its only computing partner. Altman told reporters his company has been “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”
“ChatGPT is slow. It’s not as smart as we’d like to be. Many users can’t use it as much as they would like,” Altman said. “We have many other ideas and products we want to build.”
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