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

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 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 on-site 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.

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