Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corporation, speaking with President Trump, SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 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

9/24/25 5:38AM

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.

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

Jon Keegan3/27/26

Judge blocks Pentagon’s move to blacklist Anthropic

A federal judge in Northern California has granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Pentagon from labeling Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk.

The ruling temporarily prevents the Defense Department from restricting the AI company’s access to federal contracts amid a dispute over its refusal to allow certain military and surveillance uses of its technology. The designation could also have shifted lucrative government work toward competitors, including OpenAI.

Earlier this month, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, sued 17 federal agencies and their heads, alleging the government exceeded its statutory authority.

Rani Molla3/27/26

Report: SpaceX’s record IPO may grant preferential access to retail investors and Tesla shareholders

SpaceX’s impending IPO could raise $40 billion to $80 billion and rank as the largest ever — as well as one of the most unconventional.

The Wall Street Journal reports several ways CEO Elon Musk is considering breaking with IPO norms:

Investors in his other companies, including Tesla, could receive preferential access to shares.
Individual investors may get a third or more of the allocation, far above the typical ~10% mark.
Instead of a traditional road show, Musk wants investors to visit SpaceX facilities in person.

Exclusive | The SpaceX IPO Will Be Just as Unconventional as Musk Himself

Investors in his other companies, including Tesla, could receive preferential access to shares.
Individual investors may get a third or more of the allocation, far above the typical ~10% mark.
Instead of a traditional road show, Musk wants investors to visit SpaceX facilities in person.

Rani Molla3/26/26

Tesla released estimates for Q1 deliveries and they’re lower than analysts expected

Ahead of first-quarter earnings next month, Tesla released its own company-compiled Wall Street consensus estimate for deliveries: 365,645 vehicles. While that’s lower than the 382,000 FactSet consensus estimate, it represents a nearly 9% jump from Q1 2025, when Tesla sold 336,681 vehicles.

Tesla started releasing its own consensus estimates to the public — not just institutional investors — for the first time in Q4 2025. The move was seen as a way to temper investor expectations, as other estimates were too high. Last quarter, Tesla’s compilation was closer to actual numbers, which fell 16% year over year.

The market-implied odds from event contracts suggest 64% of traders think Tesla’s Q1 deliveries will be more than 350,000, 44% think it will be higher than 360,000, and just 21% have it at higher than 370,000.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

The toughest AI benchmark just got a whole lot tougher

ARC-AGI-3 is the latest version of a clever benchmark that challenges AI models to solve mini video games with no written instructions.

Jon Keegan3/26/26

Rani Molla3/26/26

The US leads the world in robotaxi deployments

Every day it seems another robotaxi launches somewhere in the world. But most of them are in the US.

Of the 171 active robotaxi deployments globally, 69 — or 40% — are in the US, according to a new report from the Bank of America Institute. China, the next largest market, accounts for 24% of deployments.

Most of those deployments are still in testing or early commercial stages. Only 10 US cities currently have fully commercial robotaxi operations, defined as services that operate on public roads, carry paying passengers, run fully driverless without a safety driver, and function all day in any weather.

For now, that effectively refers to Alphabet’s Waymo, which operates commercially in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, and the San Francisco Bay Area. That definition excludes competitors like Tesla, whose Robotaxi service uses safety monitors, and Amazon’s Zoox, which has yet to charge customers for rides.