OpenAI, Oracle to add 4.5GW US data centre capacity in AI expansion

[SAN FRANCISCO] OpenAI and Oracle announced they will develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional US data centre capacity in an expanded partnership, furthering a massive plan to power artificial intelligence workloads.

OpenAI has yet to name the data centre sites it will codevelop with Oracle, but states including Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Wyoming are under consideration. Together with its facility being built in Abilene, Texas, the company said it will have more than five gigawatts total in capacity, running on more than two million chips for AI work. Bloomberg earlier this month reported OpenAI’s plans to rent the additional data centre capacity from Oracle.

In January, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank Group announced they would invest US$500 billion in 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure in the US in the next four years. OpenAI said on Tuesday (Jul 22) that it now expects to exceed that commitment. A gigawatt is enough to provide electricity for about 750,000 US homes. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

While OpenAI labelled the data centre expansion with Oracle as part of its Stargate project, SoftBank is not financing any of the new capacity, the AI company said. In May, Bloomberg reported that SoftBank was hitting snags in financing talks amid broader economic uncertainty around global tariffs.

The ChatGPT maker also shared an update on its initial Stargate site in Abilene, saying that the first data centre building there now powers some of OpenAI’s compute workload for running and training its algorithms. Oracle began delivering the first racks of Nvidia GB200 chips last month and parts of the data centre has been up and running for a few weeks, the company said.

“We feel pretty good about our ability to move quickly on this because in many regards, Abilene was that beta test to prove out that you could build these at scale and at speed,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI vice-president of global policy.

OpenAI also said it expects the additional data centre development to create more than 100,000 jobs in construction and operations in the US. Historically, data centres don’t employ many full-time workers. BLOOMBERG