ABILENE, Texas (AP) — The afternoon sun was so hot that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traded his usual sweater for a T-shirt on the last legs of a Tuesday visit to the massive Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex that will power the future of ChatGPT.
Altman announced Tuesday that OpenAI’s flagship artificial AI data center in Texas will be joined by five others around the U.S. as the ChatGPT maker aims to make good on the $500 billion infrastructure investment promoted by President Donald Trump earlier this year.
Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, said it is building two more data center complexes in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio and another in a Midwest location it hasn’t yet disclosed.
But it’s the project in Abilene, Texas, that promised to be the biggest of them all, transforming what the city’s mayor called an old railroad town.
Oracle executives who visited the eight-building complex said it is already on track to be the world’s largest AI supercluster once fully built, a reference to the hundreds of thousands of AI chips that will be running in its massive, H-shaped buildings.
Altman said, “When you hit that button on ChatGPT, you really don’t — I don’t, at least” — think about what happens inside the data halls used to build and operate the chatbot.
He and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouyrk also sought to emphasize the steps they’ve taken to reduce the complex’s environmental effects on a drought-prone region of West Texas, where temperatures hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday.
The complex will require about 900 megawatts of electricity to power the eight buildings, running hundreds of thousands of specialized AI chips. For the first building, each server rack holds 72 of Nvidia’s GB200 chips, which are specially designed for the most intensive AI workloads. Each building has about 60,000 of them.
One of the buildings is already operating, and a second that Altman and Magouyrk visited Tuesday is nearly complete.
OpenAI and Oracle invited media and politicians, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, to tour the site for the first time Tuesday.
“Texas is ground zero for AI,” Cruz said.
Trump touted Stargate shortly after returning to the White House in January.
The partnership said at that time it was investing $100 billion — and eventually up to $500 billion — to build large-scale data centers and the energy generation needed to further AI development.
Trump called the project a “resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential” under his new administration, though construction on the flagship project in Abilene began last year and had been in planning for years before that. Originally developed to mine cryptocurrency, developers pivoted and expanded their designs to tailor the project to the AI boom sparked by ChatGPT.
More than 6,000 workers now commute to the massive construction project each day, in what Mayor Welson Hurt described as a significant boost to the local economy.
“AI WORKERS? HUGE DISCOUNTS” says one hand-made sign for “move-in ready” homes of one to six bedrooms.
But Hurt also acknowledged that residents have mixed feelings about the project due to its water and energy effects.
The city’s chronically stressed reservoirs were at roughly half-capacity on Monday. Residents must follow a two-day-a-week outdoor watering schedule, trading off based on whether their address numbers are odd or even.
One million gallons of water from the city’s municipal water systems provides an “initial fill” for a closed-loop system that cools the data center’s computers, reducing the amount that evaporates. After that initial fill, Oracle expects each of the eight buildings to need another 12,000 gallons per year, which it describes as a “remarkably low figure for a facility of this scale.”
“These data centers are designed to not use water,” Magouyrk said. “All of the data centers that we’re building (in) this part of Stargate are designed to not use water. The reason we do that is because it turns out that’s harmful for the environment and this is a better solution.”
The closed-loop system shows that the developer is “taking its impact on local public water supplies seriously,” but the overall environmental effect is more nuanced because such systems require more electricity, which also means higher indirect water usage through power generation, said Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied AI’s environmental toll.
Indeed, the data center complex includes a new gas-fired power plant, using natural gas turbines similar to those that power warships. The companies say the plant is meant to provide backup power for the data halls and is a better option than traditional diesel generators. Most of the power comes from the local grid, which includes a mix of gas with the sprawling wind and solar farms that dot the region.
Ren said that “even with emission-reduction measures, the health impacts of essentially turning the data center site into a power plant deserve further study for nearby communities.”
Arlene Mendler, a Stargate neighbor, said she wished she had more say in the project.
“It has completely changed the way we were living,” said Mendler, who lives across the street. “We moved up here 33 years ago for the peace, quiet, tranquility. After we got home from work, we could ride horses down the road. It was that type of a place.”
Now, she doesn’t know what to do about the constant cacophony of construction sounds or the bright lights that have altered her nighttime views. The project was essentially a done deal once she found out about it.
“They took 1,200 acres and just scraped it to bare dirt,” said her husband, Fred Mendler.
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