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Earlier this week, Donald Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—one that may rival the costs of the first moon missions—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman. The project, known as Stargate, is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and several other corporate partners that aims to invest $500 billion over the next four years in America’s AI infrastructure: data centers, energy plants, power lines, and everything else needed to develop superintelligent computer programs. The first data center, already under construction, will soon be dedicated to training OpenAI’s next models.

The Stargate Project is a resounding victory for a start-up that was struggling at the end of last year, as Karen Hao wrote for The Atlantic yesterday. OpenAI had lost some of its most talented staff; its relationship with its most important financial backer, Microsoft, was under stress; and it was weathering any number of other public controversies. This week’s announcement, meanwhile, “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,” Hao wrote.

The announcement is the capstone to a steady maneuver by Altman to align himself with the incoming administration, another “masterful display of Altman’s power” to ingratiate himself with the powerful and raise huge amounts of capital, Hao noted. Altman, along with executives from Oracle and SoftBank, stood beside Trump in the White House as he made the announcement. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States,” Altman said.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

OpenAI Goes MAGA

By Karen Hao

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.)

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Sam Altman doesn’t actually need Trump: As I noted on Wednesday, the Stargate Project felt more like a display of weakness from Trump. These companies could have gone elsewhere; AI’s rapid development would have continued with or without Stargate, and under Trump or a President Kamala Harris. “Only a day into his presidency, Stargate showed Trump taking cues from China, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Biden all at once—from a foreign adversary, the tech giants he vilified in 2020, and a political rival he has ruthlessly vilified,” I wrote. OpenAI takes off its mask: “For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person,” Hao wrote last fall.

P.S.

Of course, Altman wasn’t the only one cozying up to Trump this week. At his inauguration, tech titans whose tools collectively touch billions of lives—including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Elon Musk—stood right beside Trump’s family. “The tech industry has officially placed itself in the palm of Trump’s hand,” Atlantic senior editor Damon Beres wrote on Monday.

— Matteo

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.”