Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who’d set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

And then there was Elon Musk. He’d co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X. Amid all of this drama, Altman was notified by his sister, Annie, that she intended to sue him; she alleges that he sexually abused her when she was a child. (That lawsuit was filed at the start of this month; Altman and members of his family strongly denied the allegations through a statement posted on X.)

It’s remarkable, then, that with its latest maneuver, OpenAI has once again reestablished its dominance. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture between SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI to pump $500 billion of private-sector investment over four years into building out U.S. AI infrastructure, with the intent of securing America’s leadership in AI development against China. Very little is known about how any of this will work in practice, but OpenAI is speaking as though it will reap most of the rewards: In its blog post announcing the partnership, it said that all of the infrastructure will be “for OpenAI.” The company’s president, Greg Brockman, underscored the point on X: “$500B for AI data centers for OpenAI.”

In one fell swoop, the project reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s “America First” agenda, providing the best possible protective shield against Musk. (Musk blasted the project yesterday, alleging that it doesn’t “actually have the money,” which Altman then denied.) OpenAI (which entered into a corporate partnership with The Atlantic last year) did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear whether Stargate will even be able to spend $500 billion in four years. But consider just how astounding that goal is. In late 2023, as Microsoft started spending roughly $50 billion a year on expanding cloud-computing capacity, one semiconductor analyst had already declared that that was “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” Rene Haas, the CEO of the semiconductor company Arm Holdings, said that even this pace of expansion across the industry would put global computing on track to consume more energy than India by 2030.

[Read: Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI]

The move is a masterful display of Altman’s power at work. Altman has shown an uncanny ability throughout his career to get himself out of the toughest binds by leaning on his influential network, ingratiating himself with the powerful, and fundraising extraordinary amounts of capital. It was for these reasons that Altman successfully orchestrated his return to OpenAI as CEO in late 2023, after the board briefly ousted him. And it is why so many people have expressed alarm about his leadership in recent years. This week, he was at it again, standing next to Trump during the Stargate announcement in a symbol of solidarity and praising him later on X: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him … i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!”

Although OpenAI has led the pack, many AI companies have worked over the past two years to influence policy and grow without government interference. Silicon Valley has always operated like this, and many other major tech CEOs took their place next to Trump this week. But the demands of generative AI are meaningfully different from, say, those of a traditional search engine or a social-media platform: Its development requires far more crucial physical infrastructure. Generative-AI models are of a size that necessitate the build-out of data centers at unprecedented scale. This, in turn, will give Silicon Valley outsize influence over the placement of power plants and even water lines across the country. Already, the past few years of dramatic data-center expansion have affected power reliability for millions of Americans and threatened to raise the cost of drinking water.

[Read: Billions of people in the palm of Trump’s hand]

The tech industry expertly laid the groundwork for this outcome: It made big promises about the wondrous potential of its technologies while creating a sense of peril by evoking China’s own technological advancement. During the Stargate announcement, Trump said that he would do what he could to strip away any regulatory barriers. “China is a competitor, and others are competitors,” he said. “I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built.”

Standing at the same podium, Altman emphasized America’s leadership. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America,” he said. And then, in recognition of his new benefactor: “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”

On Sunday night, in the basement ballroom of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C., Charlie Kirk was happier than I’d ever seen him. “I truly believe that this is God’s grace on our country, giving us another chance to fight and to flourish,” Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth-outreach organization, said to cheers from the hundreds of MAGA loyalists who had come out for his pre-inaugural ball. “What we are about to experience is a new golden era, an American renaissance.”

The celebrations have continued now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, as he has signed a flurry of executive orders to make good on his campaign promises. But this might be the best mood that MAGA world will be in for a while. The president’s coalition is split between two distinct but overlapping factions that are destined for infighting. On one side are the far-right nationalists and reactionaries who have stood by Trump since he descended down his golden escalator. Among them are Stephen Miller, who is seen as a chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the former executive chair of Breitbart News. On the other side is the tech right: Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who have become ardent supporters of the president. Already, these groups are butting heads on key aspects of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Trump’s second term, not everyone can win.

During the campaign, it was easy for these two groups to be aligned in the goal of electing Trump. Members of the nationalist wing took glee in how Musk boosted their ideology on X, the social platform he owns. With his more than 200 million followers, Musk has helped spread far-right conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. Meanwhile, the tech right has relished attacks on DEI efforts in the workplace—attacks that have allowed them to more easily walk back hiring practices, against the wishes of their more liberal employees.

But the two groups also want different things. The nationalist right wants an economy that prioritizes and assists American-born families (specifically, traditional nuclear ones), sometimes at the expense of business interests; the tech right wants a deregulated economy that bolsters its bottom line. The nationalist right wants to stop almost all immigration; the tech right wants to bring in immigrant workers as it pleases. The nationalist right wants to return America to a pre-internet era that it perceives as stable and prosperous; the tech right wants to usher in a bold, globally focused new economy.   

Already, the cracks have started to show. Last month, Trump’s pick of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser led to a bitter and very public spat between the two camps over visas for highly skilled immigrants. (“FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” Musk at one point told his critics on the right.) At the time, I argued that the MAGA honeymoon is over. The disagreements have only intensified. Last week, after former President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to warn about the influence of Silicon Valley oligarchs and the “tech industrial complex,” the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes posted on X that “Biden is right.” Bannon in particular has not relented: Earlier this month, he told an Italian newspaper that Musk is a “truly evil person” and that would get the billionaire “kicked out” of Trump’s orbit by Inauguration Day. (Considering that Musk is reportedly getting an office in the West Wing, Bannon does not seem to have been successful in that quest.) In an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, Bannon described the tech titans as “nerds” whom Trump was humiliating. Seeing them on Inauguration Day was “like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot,” Bannon said.

In a sense, he is right. During the inauguration ceremony, tech billionaires—including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—sat directly behind Trump’s family on the dais. They are not all as forcefully pro-Trump as Musk, but they have cozied up to the president by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago and making million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund (in some cases from their personal bank accounts, and in others from the corporations they head).

In doing so, they’ve gotten his ear and can now influence the president in ways that might not line up with the priorities of the nationalist right. On Monday, during his first press conference from the White House this term, Trump defended the H-1B visa program: “We want competent people coming into our country,” he said. Later, Bannon responded on his podcast, lamenting the “techno-feudalists” to whom Trump is apparently listening.

Both factions still have overlapping interests. They are both fed up with a country that they see as having grown weak and overly considerate to the needs of the vulnerable, at the expense of the most productive. America lacks a “masculine energy,” as Zuckerberg recently put it. Some members in both camps seem interested in trying to reconcile their differences, or at least in not driving the wedge further. On the eve of the inauguration, just before Turning Point USA’s ball, the right-wing publishing house Passage Publishing held its own ball in D.C.—an event intended to be a night when “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” The head of Passage Publishing, Jonathan Keeperman, has been keen on playing peacemaker. Last month, he went on Kirk’s podcast and tried to frame the debate over visas as one where his reactionary, nativist wing of the right could find common cause with the tech right. By limiting immigration and “developing our own native-born” STEM talent, he said, Silicon Valley can “win the AI arms race.”

Kirk couldn’t keep his frustration toward the tech elite from seeping out. “Big Tech has censored us and smeared us and treated us terribly,” he said. “Why would we then accommodate their policy wishes?” It’s easy to imagine Musk asking the same question. He and his peers run some of the most powerful companies in the world. They’re not going to give that up because a few  people, on the very platforms that they own, told them to. Each side is steadfast in what it wants, and won’t easily give in.

We already can guess how this will end. During his first administration, despite making populist promises on the campaign trail, Trump eventually sided with the wealthy. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during the start of his first term, pushed for tax hikes on the wealthy. Seven months into his presidency, Trump fired him, and then proceeded to pass tax cuts. In his new administration, the nationalist right will certainly make gains—it is thrilled with Trump’s moves around birthright citizenship and his pledge to push forward with mass deportations. But if it’s ever in conflict with what Trump’s rich advisers in the tech world want, good luck.

Remember, it was Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk who sat on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Bannon, Keeperman, and Kirk were nowhere in sight.