Stargate Project: Trump Announces $500 Billion AI Investment

In a news conference on Tuesday, President Trump announced the Stargate Project, which he called “the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.”

With the CEOs of OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank at his side, Trump said that these companies and other private sector partners will invest up to US $500 billion in building data centers across the United States, with the first $100 billion coming this year. The announcement came the day after Trump rescinded former President Biden’s executive order on AI, which aimed to increase safeguards for the technology.

While details about Stargate are scarce, experts in AI, energy, and data centers had a range of reactions to the news.

What AI Experts Say About Stargate

Shelly Palmer, a tech pundit and consultant, argued that Stargate will give the United States a strategic advantage, and that it will bring benefits we can’t yet imagine. He wrote:

As for the 100,000 jobs the project is supposed to create? Some construction jobs will be created as the data centers are built, but many more (millions more) will be created as the data centers come online. We’ve never had a compute cloud like this— there’s literally no way to calculate the economic impact of this amount of AI compute. It will be massive.

There are many tech skeptics, and it has become fashionable to denigrate and vilify big tech. To me, the Stargate Project is the first step in securing the future of the U.S. economy as well as our digital and cyber security. Every business will benefit from the power and promise of AI, and—like it or not, believe it or not—warfare will be dominated by AI. Today, the U.S. has a clear lead. The Stargate Project will help ensure it stays that way.

But not everyone is so bullish. The noted AI critic Gary Marcus responded to a post on X (formerly Twitter) from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saying that the project will be “great for our country” (itself in response to Elon Musk casting doubt on the project’s financing). Marcus took issue with Altman’s rosy optimism:

Like a lot of what Sam says, this is based on the conjecture, or in this case multiple conjectures:

1) The entirely speculative conjecture that LLMs or something else OpenAI figures out how to be build will be enormously profitable. So far the [cost of] infrastructure field-wide ($250B, perhaps) has enormously outweighed total revenue, perhaps 50:1.

2) The entirely speculative conjecture that any profits will actually do much to help the American people, as opposed to just enriching those who own that infrastructure. Yes, some people will be employed building data centers; but if the data centers work towards better AI, many others will lose their jobs. Net effect is entirely unclear.

Meanwhile,Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for the advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation, told IEEE Spectrum that the core of this initiative may not be new.