Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…Open AI’s gigawatt arms race is underway in Abilene, Texas…Nscale announces record-breaking $1.1 billion Series B...OpenAI and Databricks strike AI agent deal…Trump administration will provide Elon Musk’s xAI to federal agencies.
Sam Altman stood outside Building 2 at OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank’s flagship Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. He — along with the cluster of journalists peppering him with questions — looked small against the backdrop of the sprawling 800-acre site, swarming with thousands of construction workers and dotted with spools of fiber cable, steel beams, water pipes, and heavy machinery.
As I reported on Tuesday, we were there for a media event to tout the progress of the high-profile and ambitious “Stargate” AI infrastructure project. OpenAI and Oracle announced an expansion of the Abilene site, plus plans to build five massive new data center complexes across the U.S. over the next several years. Altogether, the initiative represents hundreds of billions of dollars in investment — a project of mind-boggling scale. In Abilene alone, a crew of 6,400 workers has already flattened hills by moving mountains of soil and laid enough fiber optic cable to wrap the Earth 16 times.
