The Trump Administration ended its first full day of business with a major AI business announcement, that hundreds of billions of dollars – potentially trillions of dollars – will be invested in the build-out of AI infrastructure and data centers in the U.S.
Joining President Trump at a White House press event late this afternoon were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle Co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison and Softbank Founder and CEO Masayoshi Son to announce the launch of Texas-based Stargate, with an opening commitment of $100 billion and then as much as $500 billion over the next several years, along with the creation of 100,000 AI-related jobs.
AI data center construction has already begun in Texas, according to President Trump, who added that hundreds of billions of additional AI investments may be on the way.
The news has enormous implications not only for the three companies at today’s White House event but for many companies across the larger AI ecosystem – chip makers (Nvidia, AMD, Intel), data center and hyperscale companies, AI-related software companies (Palantir, Microsoft, Salesforce, to new a few) – the stocks of all these companies and many more jumped when reports of the announcement emerged late today.
But there are limiting factors on big AI ambitions, chief among them the tremendous amount of electrical power required to run massive data cenOpeters. It was two years ago nesxt month that AMD CEO Lisa Su said the day may be coming when large-scale data centers may require their own modular nuclear power plants.
In fact, according to a Reuters story today, a report last month from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation stated that exploding power demand from AI data centers means that “about half of the country is at increased risk of power supply shortfalls in the next decade.”
