OpenAI is reportedly planning to shift its compute needs away from Microsoft and instead rely on capacity provided by its Stargate partner SoftBank.
According to a report from The Information, OpenAI recently told investors that it expects SoftBank-backed Stargate to provide three-quarters of the compute power needed to run and develop its AI models by 2030.
OpenAI also reportedly said that SoftBank will provide at least $30 billion of the $40 billion the generative AI company is hoping to raise in order to secure its $260bn valuation.
Approximately half of that money will be used to support Stargate – a $500bn joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and Abu Dhabi's MGX to deploy a number of large data centers across the US – with OpenAI expecting to have $10bn of the total funds raised by the end of March.
Currently, OpenAI gets most of its data center capacity from Microsoft, which is its biggest shareholder. However, OpenAI has been working on its own major data center projects since at least early 2024 to meet its increasing capacity needs.
Although Microsoft is not an equity partner of Stargate, it remains a major shareholder in OpenAI itself, and as a result of previously being OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, the company now has a right of first refusal to serve the AI firm.
Despite this shift away from Microsoft, as The Information noted, nothing will change overnight, and OpenAI is still expecting to more than double its spending on Microsoft-owned data centers between now and 2028 to around $28bn - a figure The Information says is based on contracts signed by the two companies.
Stargate is currently set to be built out over four years, with OpenAI aiming to develop five to ten campuses, each able to support 1GW of capacity or more. By 2030, OpenAI hopes to command a fleet with some 8GW of capacity.
Earlier this month, it was reported that OpenAI was exploring Stargate data center options in 16 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
Stargate’s first project is a large-scale data center campus in Abilene. Texas. Crusoe is developing the campus in partnership with Oracle on land owned by Lancium.
