OpenAI Stargate is a $500B bet: America’s AI Manhattan Project or costly dead end?

In case you missed it amid the flurry of executive orders coming out of the White House in the days since President Trump returned to office for his second non-consecutive term this week, the single largest investment in AI infrastructure was just announced yesterday afternoon. Known as “the Stargate Project,” it’s a $500 billion (half a trillion) effort from OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX to form a new venture that will build “new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States,” and as OpenAI put it in its announcement post on the social network X, to “support the re-industrialization of the United States… also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”

The end goal: to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that outperforms humans on most economically valuable work, which has been OpenAI’s goal from the ...