OpenAI Signs 4.5GW Datacenter Capacity Partnership with Oracle, says Stargate to Expand Significantly

OpenAI just signed a deal with Oracle for an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity — enough electricity to power several million homes — and Altman says it's planning to "significantly expand the ambitions of Stargate past the $500 billion commitment we announced in January."

Key Points

• OpenAI's new Oracle deal adds 4.5 GW of capacity, bringing total Stargate development to over 5 GW across 2+ million AI chips
• The expansion will create over 100,000 jobs and signals OpenAI expects to exceed its original $500B infrastructure commitment
• This represents one of the largest single data center leasing deals ever, highlighting the massive power requirements for next-gen AI

The 4.5-gigawatt partnership with Oracle brings Stargate's total capacity under development to over 5 gigawatts, which will run over 2 million chips — a staggering amount of computing power that underscores just how much juice cutting-edge AI development requires.

To put that in perspective, one megawatt is enough energy to power about 200 American homes, which means this Oracle expansion alone could theoretically power around 900,000 to 1.8 million households.

The scale reflects the brutal reality of the AI arms race. Traditional data centers are designed with 5-10 kW power per rack, while AI data centers require 60 or more kW per rack. When you're training frontier AI models that could eventually reach AGI and super intelligence, the power requirements explode.

Construction of Stargate I in Abilene is progressing and parts of the facility are now up and running. Oracle began delivering the first NVIDIA GB200 racks last month and we recently began running early training and inference workloads, using this capacity to push the limits of OpenAI's next-generation frontier research.

The Stargate project, announced at the White House in January, started as a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX with $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.

Politically, the expansion is a win for President Trump’s bid to “reindustrialize” the U.S. and outrun China on AI. The Abilene site is already humming, and OpenAI says today’s Oracle boost alone will spin up 100,000 construction and operations jobs over the next few years.  

We estimate that building, developing and operating the additional 4.5 GW of data center capacity we're announcing today will create over 100,000 jobs across construction and operations roles in the U.S.

The Oracle partnership makes strategic sense for both companies. OpenAI plans to rent around 4.5GW of capacity from Oracle, with the contract running through OpenAI's Stargate joint venture - of which Oracle is an investor. Oracle will develop multiple data centers across the US with partners. The existing Abilene, Texas, data center campus, built with partner Crusoe, could be expanded from 1.2GW to 2GW, while it is also evaluating other sites in Texas. Other states being considered include Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming, New Mexico, Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Complementing this expansion with Oracle, OpenAI's partnership with SoftBank is moving forward with strong momentum. Both are critical to meeting their continually expanding compute needs, the company said in its announcement.

The announcement also signals OpenAI's confidence in securing the massive funding required. When the original Stargate project was announced, Elon Musk criticized it, writing on X: "They don't actually have the money. SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman countered that claim, replying to Musk, "wrong, as you surely know".

This Oracle expansion suggests Altman wasn't bluffing about the financial backing. The sheer scale of this infrastructure push — both in terms of power requirements and geographic spread — represents a bet that the future of AI will require computing resources on a scale we've never seen before.

Whether that bet pays off will determine not just OpenAI's future, but potentially America's position in the global AI race.