OpenAI Expands Stargate, Musk Reveals xAI’s 50M H100 Plan

OpenAI announced a 4.5 gigawatt expansion in partnership with Oracle to power future AI development.

The deal, part of OpenAI’s long-term vision to deploy 10 gigawatts of compute capacity across the US, will add to its existing Stargate I facility in Abilene, Texas, and push the project beyond its original commitment made at the White House in January, the firm said on Tuesday.

“This is a gigantic infrastructure project,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X, sharing images of the Abilene site. In an earlier post, he confirmed that over 1 million GPUs will be online by year-end, and joked, “Now they better get to work figuring out how to 100x that.”

The additional Oracle deal will bring Stargate’s total development pipeline to over 5 GW, enough to power over 2 million AI chips. “We are planning to significantly expand the ambitions of Stargate past the $500 billion commitment we announced in January,” Altman added.

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Musk unveils bold plan for xAI

Following the announcement by OpenAI, Elon Musk also shared a bold plan for his AI firm xAI. “The @xAI goal is 50 million in units of H100 equivalent-AI compute (but much better power-efficiency) online within 5 years,” the billionaire wrote in a Tuesday post on X.  

According to estimates by X user TeslaPrice, this would represent 500 times the compute power of what was considered the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer just one year ago.

XAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputer, set to go live soon, will use 550,000 GB200 chips, roughly equivalent to 5.5 million H100s. Musk’s plan with xAI, if realized, would nearly 10x that.

“Elon is saying they will get to equivalent of 50 million H100 within 5 years. So that will be 500x from the state of the art cluster 12 months ago,” the user estimated.

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$500B Stargate AI project faces challenges

Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump announced the launch of Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative led by the private sector. The project is backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, aiming to build AI data centers across the US and create over 100,000 jobs.

However, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, the initiative has faced major delays and internal disagreements between key partners SoftBank and OpenAI.

Despite initial promises to deploy $100 billion immediately, the project has scaled back its near-term goals to building a single data center by year-end, according to the report.

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