President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that the US will be working with three tech companies as they invest billions of dollars in the private sector to help build infrastructure for artificial intelligence in the United States.
In a White House briefing from Tuesday, Trump shared that the investment will be part of a joint venture between the US, OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle. The project has been named Stargate.
“What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country,” Trump said. “China is a competitor. Others are competitors. We want to be in this country, and we’re making it available. I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.”
Executives from the three companies are expected to commit $500 billion to Stargate over the next four years, but details of the new partnership have not been made public at this time.
Sam Altman from OpenAI, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, and Larry Ellison from Oracle were all present when Trump made the announcement on Tuesday.
Ellison shared with reporters that construction projects for 10 data centers in Texas for the new project were already underway. He also noted that more are being planned for the future.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison told reporters.
Trump spoke about the economic impact of the investment, saying the joint venture would result in the creation of “over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.”
Altman went as far as to call Stargate the “most important project of this era.”
Tech companies have been struggling to push their AI further throughout the past year as many ran into issues with powering the software. Companies like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft have all discussed or made moves to obtain nuclear power as a means to power the warehouses full of computers that are needed to operate AI.
While the joint venture only includes the three companies at this moment, more are expected to join in the future.