Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corporation speaking with President Trump, SoftBank’s Group CEO, Masayoshi Son, and Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, announcing Stargate at the White House in January (Jabin Botsford/Getty Images)

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announce five new AI data center sites, putting Stargate ahead of schedule

Two of the sites will be in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, and one in the Midwest.

David Crowther

Since Oracle’s $300 billion deal with OpenAI grabbed the headlines a few weeks ago — sending Oracle’s stock soaring and briefly making its chairman the world’s richest person — some of the biggest questions involved what the cloud computing company would do to deliver all the capacity it had promised, and how that would be financed.

Now, we’re getting more specifics on these fronts: OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced late last night that they would be expanding Stargate with five new AI data center sites. Separately, Bloomberg is reporting that Oracle is looking to tap the US corporate bond market for $15 billion today, which includes a 40-year offering.

The data center build-out plans put the much-hyped Stargate initiative, announced by President Trump and the companies’ leaders back in January, ahead of schedule. Per a press release from OpenAI:

The combined capacity from these five new sites—along with our flagship site in Abilene, Texas, and ongoing projects with CoreWeave—brings Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and over $400 billion in investment over the next three years. This puts us on a clear path to securing the full $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment we announced in January by the end of 2025, ahead of schedule.

Three of the sites appear to fall under the $300 billion OpenAI and Oracle deal which was signed in July. Those three new sites are to be located in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an unannounced site somewhere in the Midwest. The Stargate flagship site, in Abilene, Texas is also being mooted for a potential expansion of 600 megawatts of capacity. Together, the Abilene upgrade, plus the three new sites, can deliver over 5.5 gigawatts of capacity, according to OpenAI, and will create over 25,000 onsite jobs.

The other two newly-announced sites will be located in Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas, and are being developed through a partnership between SoftBank and OpenAI, with the sites able to scale up to 1.5 gigawatts of capacity, per OpenAI’s statement.

The data center in Abilene, Texas is reportedly already up and running on Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure, and the first NVIDIA GB200 racks were delivered to the site in June.

As of 5 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Oracle’s stock was 0.4% higher. Nvidia, which jumped on Monday as investors cheered news of its bumper ~$100 billion OpenAI investment but dipped yesterday, has also been trading 0.7% higher in Wednesday’s premarket, as the company deepens its vertical integration across the AI supply chain.

Go Deeper: Bank of America explains why Nvidia almost has to invest in OpenAI and Intel

Jon Keegan

great scott!

23h

Clash of the titans: Here are the biggest AI data center projects

Hyperion, Colossus, Prometheus, and Stargate. Our guide to the GPUs and gigawatts that make up the largest AI infrastructure projects in the industry.

Man and Girl Walking Through Aisle of Computers

Rani Molla23h

Meta launches federal super PAC to fight state AI policy proposals

Meta has launched a federal super PAC called the American Technology Excellence Project, spending “tens of millions” of dollars to fight what it considers “onerous AI and tech policy bills across the country,” Axios reports. Last month, Meta launched a California super PAC to back pro-AI candidates in the state.

Silicon Valley in general has been rushing behind pro-AI PACs, seeking to fight proposals like Senator Mark Kelly’s that would force AI companies to foot some of the bill for the societal ills they cause.

Exclusive: Meta launches super PAC to fight AI regulation

Rani Molla23h

Wedbush: Nvidia investment in OpenAI is a “watershed moment”

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives thinks Nvidia’s $100 billion investment in OpenAI says a lot of things about the importance of the moment we’re in. It’s a “watershed moment,” a “Ryder Cup moment,” and a “validation sign that the AI Arms Race is heating up among Big Tech firms.” In a note this morning, Ives wrote:

“We believe the AI Revolution is now heading into its next stage of growth as the tidal wave of Big Tech capex spending coupled by enterprise use cases now exploding across verticals is creating a number of AI winners in the tech world. The last few months we have seen a major validation moment for our AI Revolution bull thesis as the cloud stalwarts Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are leading the charge on this unprecedented spending cycle. Nvidia’s recent robust earnings and demand commentary from the Godfather of AI Jensen speaks to the evolution of AI spend now spreading beyond Big Tech to governments, enterprises, energy capacity, and overall infrastructure build outs around the globe.”

He does not consider it a bubble — or at least not yet. “While there are worries about an ‘AI Bubble’ and stretched valuations we continue to view this as a 1996 Moment for the Tech World and NOT a 1999 Moment,” Ives wrote, suggesting the situation is more like the early days of the internet, when there was a lot of investment in internet companies and a lot of experimentation — and when the dot-com bubble bursting was still a few years off.

If having multiple CEOs is better for stock market returns, Oracle is quadrupling down

But buyer beware: the last time Oracle had co-CEOs, shares underperformed.

Nate Becker9/22/25

Rani Molla9/22/25

Ives raises Apple price target to Wall Street high of $310, citing a “real upgrade cycle” for iPhones

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives raised his Apple price target to $310 from $270 thanks to “early strong demand signs” for the iPhone 17, which he says is tracking 10% to 15% ahead of the iPhone 16 at this point.

That $310 price target is the highest among Wall Street analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Ives said the Street’s estimate of about 230 million iPhone unit sales for Apple’s upcoming fiscal year is conservative and instead thinks the company is on track to sell 240 million to 250 million units in FY26. Ives wrote:

“The combination of a pent-up consumer upgrade cycle with our estimates of 315 million of 1.5 billion iPhones globally not upgrading their iPhones in the last 4 years, coupled with some design changes/enhancements have been the magical formula out of the gates.”

Sherwood News reported last week that redesigned iPhone models, which went on sale Friday, are seeing more interest than they have in three years — a phenomenon we speculate might have less to do with the iPhone itself and more to do with a natural upgrade cycle, as the rush of phones purchased in 2020 and 2021 become obsolete.