Stargate skirmish
Donald Trump's mega AI infrastructure announcement was ultimately overshadowed by the long-running feud between two of the biggest names in tech, Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
It’s increasingly obvious that AI — and the US dominance thereof — is a key plank of Donald Trump’s America First economic agenda. Standing alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this week, Trump announced the launch of The Stargate Project, a new company that will build data centres to power OpenAI’s insatiable algorithms.
With promised investment of USD500 billion ($797 billion), it’s an infrastructure buildout that rivals some of the largest in world history, and it represents an enormous bet on a not-too-distant future world powered by autonomous AI agents and systems.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump’s contribution to Stargate is exactly. Particularly given it was first reported by The Information back in April and has already begun construction in at least one site in Texas, with support from a lineup of investors and partners including Microsoft, SoftBank, Oracle and Nvidia.
But the rhetorical support is clear. The new administration wants to ensure America reaps the spoils of technological innovation and maintains its lead over China. This is far from a hypothetical contest — just this week, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its latest open source model, which challenges OpenAI’s bleeding edge reasoning models at a fraction of the cost.
