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Earlier this week, Donald Trump unveiled perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in history—one that may rival the costs of the first moon missions—and all but dedicated it to Sam Altman. The project, known as Stargate, is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and several other corporate partners that aims to invest $500 billion over the next four years in America’s AI infrastructure: data centers, energy plants, power lines, and everything else needed to develop superintelligent computer programs. The first data center, already under construction, will soon be dedicated to training OpenAI’s next models.
The Stargate Project is a resounding victory for a start-up that was struggling at the end of last year, as Karen Hao wrote for The Atlantic yesterday. OpenAI had lost some of its most talented staff; its relationship with its most important financial backer, Microsoft, was under stress; and it was weathering any number of other public controversies. This week’s announcement, meanwhile, “reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda,” Hao wrote.
The announcement is the capstone to a steady maneuver by Altman to align himself with the incoming administration, another “masterful display of Altman’s power” to ingratiate himself with the powerful and raise huge amounts of capital, Hao noted. Altman, along with executives from Oracle and SoftBank, stood beside Trump in the White House as he made the announcement. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States,” Altman said.
OpenAI Goes MAGA
By Karen Hao
Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who’d set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.
And then there was Elon Musk. He’d co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X. Amid all of this drama, Altman was notified by his sister, Annie, that she intended to sue him; she alleges that he sexually abused her when she was a child. (That lawsuit was filed at the start of this month; Altman and members of his family strongly denied the allegations through a statement posted on X.)
What to Read Next
- Sam Altman doesn’t actually need Trump: As I noted on Wednesday, the Stargate Project felt more like a display of weakness from Trump. These companies could have gone elsewhere; AI’s rapid development would have continued with or without Stargate, and under Trump or a President Kamala Harris. “Only a day into his presidency, Stargate showed Trump taking cues from China, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Biden all at once—from a foreign adversary, the tech giants he vilified in 2020, and a political rival he has ruthlessly vilified,” I wrote.
- OpenAI takes off its mask: “For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person,” Hao wrote last fall.
P.S.
Of course, Altman wasn’t the only one cozying up to Trump this week. At his inauguration, tech titans whose tools collectively touch billions of lives—including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Elon Musk—stood right beside Trump’s family. “The tech industry has officially placed itself in the palm of Trump’s hand,” Atlantic senior editor Damon Beres wrote on Monday.
— Matteo
The post Trump Bets It All on OpenAI appeared first on The Atlantic.
