Oracle ‘To Spend $40bn’ On Nvidia Chips For Stargate Campus

Oracle is planning to spend about $40 billion (£29.5bn) on Nvidia GB200 AI accelerators for a giant US data centre in Texas as part of the Stargate infrastructure project it is developing with OpenAI, SoftBank and others, the Financial Times reported.

Oracle is to purchase about 400,000 of the high-end chips for training and running AI systems and lease the capacity to OpenAI, the paper reported.

Ground was broken on the Abilene, Texas site last year, which is billed as the first Stargate project and is to provide 1.2 gigawatts of computing power when completed next year.

Computing power

Site owners Crusoe and investment firm Blue Owl Capital have reportedly raised $15bn in debt and equity to finance the project, which is to consist of eight buildings and is expected to be operational by mid-2026.

Oracle has reportedly agreed to lease the site for 15 years.

JPMorgan provided the bulk of the debt financing with two loans totalling $9.6bn, including a $7.1bn loan announced last week, the FT said.

Crusoe and Blue Owl have separately invested about $5bn in cash.

OpenAI and SoftBank have each committed $18bn to Stargate, with Oracle and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund MGX committing $7bn each, according to the report.

SoftBank and OpenAI are to be majority owners, with the other two investors also holding equity stakes in the project.

Stargate is a critical plan for OpenAI to reduce its dependence on Microsoft, which has until now provided all of its computing infrastructure.

Independence

The companies earlier this year agreed to terminate their exclusivity arrangement after OpenAI reportedly became frustrated with Microsoft’s inability to supply its requirements.

The two are renegotiating the terms of their partnership over the terms of Microsoft’s continued access to OpenAI’s intellectual property, such as future AI models, according to earlier reports.

Earlier this month the US and the United Arab Emirates reached a deal to build a massive 10-square-mile data centre campus in Abu Dhabi that will be part of the Stargate project.

The campus, to be built by UAE AI start-up G42, is planned to provide some 5GW of power.

xAI and Amazon are also planning data centre complexes with more than 1GW of power.