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Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
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- attentive 2y agowhat will they call the SG-1?
- MaximilianEmel 2y agoHow much is allocated to alignment/safety research?
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- whalesalad 2y agoI'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
- Willingham 2y agoAgreed, and whats the story behind the art chosen for the landing page?
- EForEndeavour 2y agoI'm also curious how a global leader in multimodal generative AI chose this particular image. Did they prompt a generator for a super messy impressionist painting of red construction cranes with visible brush strokes, distorted to the point of barely being able to discern what the image represents?
- miltonlost 2y agoConsidering Stargate's introduction and plan seems to be a super messy concept of impressions of ideas and very lacking in details, the picture makes a lot of sense. Let AI evangelists see the future in the fuzz; let AI pessimists see failure in the abstract; let investors see $$$ in their pockets.
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- tux3 2y agoWell, the silver lining is the incredible human capacity to get used to almost any situation given enough time It will get weirder, but only relatively so, the concept of normalcy always trailing just a little bit behind as we slide
- bcye 2y agoReference for others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1ff0HhNMso https://youtube.com/watch?v=L1ff0HhNMso
- miltonlost 2y agoFor me it's watching a gay man grovel at the feet of one of the most anti-LGBT politicians, a day after Trump signed multiple executive orders that dehumanized Altman and the LGBT community. Every token thinks they're special until they're spent.
- cpursley 2y ago[flagged]
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
- cpursley 2y agoThat was my literal point to parent.
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y ago[flagged]
- whalesalad 2y agosama, peter thiel ... they dgaf. there is a huge difference between an oppressed gay person and a wealthy one. no one wants to bite the hand that feeds.
- ImJamal 2y agoTrump was the first president to come into office supporting gay marriage. Trump only has a problem with the "t" part of the community and only in bathrooms and sports, not in general.
- mpalmer 2y agoThis didn't age well.
- mclau156 2y ago[flagged]
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- eterpstra 2y agoAccording to the business plan, solving world hunger and ending disease comes AFTER the 1/2 trillion dollar AGI buildout.
- angoragoats 2y agoI weep for our country.
- redeux 2y agoI feel like Poe’s Law is in effect here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- bagels 2y agoI will be shocked if AGI happens and hunger decreases.
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- goatlover 2y agoAGI is the magic bullet to all of humanity's problems for some people. There is no explanation of how AGI will accomplish such things, just a belief that it will.
- xienze 2y agoOK, that would cover about a year of expenses. Then what?
- newfocogi 2y ago> "OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft" Not sure why, but the word choice of "consumption" feels like a reverse Freudian slip to me.
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- gamegoblin 2y agoIndustry standard word, e.g. "consumption pricing" etc But yeah if you're in the industry it's easy to forget how certain jargon sounds based on its dictionary definition
- hinkley 2y agoBut the good news is when the Trough of Disillusionment starts we can make a bunch of tuberculosis jokes.
- hinkley 2y agoSometimes the person writing the copy is writing it because they talk good, not because they are the biggest proponent of the idea. Give a clever, articulate person a task to write about something they don't believe in and they will include the subtlest of barbs, weak praise, or both.
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- SvenL 2y agoMeh, why did they choose this name. Stargate does not deserve this…
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- buildbot 2y agoThe project predates Trump: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-largest-data-center-and-how-to-profit-from-it-f6a2f3178946 https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l... (But yes I agree)
- non- 2y agoAny clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?
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- MangoCoffee 2y agodata center + gpu server farm (?)
- mrandish 2y agoPlus power plants to drive the massive data centers. At large enough scale, power availability and cost is a constraint.
- burnte 2y agoThat was literally my question. Is this basically just for more datacenters, NVidia chips, and electricity with a sprinkling of engineers to run it all? If so, then that $500bn should NOT be invested in today's tech, but instead in making more powerful and power efficient chips, IMO.
- bitmasher9 2y agoI don’t know if $500bn could put anyone ahead of nvidia/tmc.
- entropicdrifter 2y agoNvidia's in on it, so presumably this is a doubling-down on Nvidia as the chip developers
- amluto 2y ago$500bn of usefully deployed engineering, mostly software, seems like it would put AMD far ahead of Nvidia. Actually usefully deploying large amounts of money is not so easy, though, and this would still go through TSMC.
- barbazoo 2y ago> This project will [...] support the re-industrialization of the United States How?
- openplatypus 2y agoHush. Don't ask questions. It is going to be great.
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- amarcheschi 2y agoBy aggregating the means of production even more in the hands of a handful of people Wait, was it supposed to re industrialize the USA?
- jazzyjackson 2y agoDidn't you see the impressionist art of construction cranes?
- dutchbookmaker 2y agoI thought this meant it was $500 billion in government money. Some of these companies do have huge cash reserves they don't know what to do with so if it is $500 billion of private money, I am not going to complain. I will believe it when I see it though and that this isn't a 100 billion in private money with a 400 billion dollar free US government put option for the "private" investors if things don't go perfect.
- DoubleGlazing 2y agoThat's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on much more worthy things.
- newfocogi 2y agoWho/what is MGX? Google returns a few hits, none of which are clearly who is referred to here.
- rfw300 2y agoMGX is an arm of the United Arab Emirates' sovereign wealth operation: https://www.mgx.ae/en https://www.mgx.ae/en
- segasaturn 2y agoI feel like that, along with SoftBank's investment, tell me everything about how serious this project is.
- rozap 2y agoDon't worry, Oracle is also involved.
- amarcheschi 2y agoSkynet will be written in Java. I'm sorry, the verbose language wins
- Barrin92 2y agoat least that explains why it wants to do us in.
- zingababba 2y agoDamn, we really won't ever be able to understand it.
- talldayo 2y agoA sheikh, a famously overzealous Japanese firm and Larry Elisson walk into a bar. Ordinarily a joke would follow, but now America is volunteering to be the punchline.
- jklinger410 2y ago> starting in Texas Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do business.
- nateglims 2y agoThe white house was touting this so it's probably to secure political patronage or will be part of pork barrel spending to get some other bill passed.
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- avs733 2y agoWhen doing business is a bribe it’s perfect
- jofzar 2y agoIt doesn't even have an electricity grid that works, maybe that's where the 500b is going, reconnecting it to the grid.
- Jtsummers 2y agoNo state income tax, fewer regulations (zoning, environmental regulations) than other parts of the country, relatively cheap power, large existing industrial base. For skilled labor that last bit is important. Also one of the cheapest states wrt minimum wage (same as federal, nothing added), which is important for unskilled labor. Depending on the part of the state, relatively low costs of living which is helpful if you don't like paying people much. Large areas that are relatively undeveloped or underdeveloped which can mean cheaper land.
- mandevil 2y agoMy guess would be it's all about electricity. Texas has a .... unique energy market (literally! They don't connect to the national grid so they can avoid US Government regulations- that way it's not interstate commerce). Because of that spot prices fluctuate very wildly up and down, depending on the weather, demand, and their large quantity of renewables (Texas is good for solar and wind energy). When the weather is good for renewables they have very cheap electricity (lots of production and can't sell to anyone outside the state), when the weather is bad they can have incredibly expensive electricity (less production, can't buy from anyone outside the state). Larger markets, able to pull from larger pools of producers and consumers, just fluctuate less. I know some bitcoin miners liked to be in Texas and basically worked as energy speculators: when electricity was cheap they would mine bitcoin, when it was expensive they shut down their plant- sometimes they even got paid by producers to shut-down their plant! I would bet that you could do a lot of that with AI training as well, given good checkpointing. You wouldn't want to do inference there (which needs to be responsive and doesn't like 'oh this plant is going to shut down in one minute because a storm just came up') but for training it should be fine?
- heydenberk 2y ago~$125B per year would be 2-3% of all domestic investment. It's similar in scale to the GDP of a small middle income country. If the electric grid — particularly the interconnection queue — is already the bottleneck to data center deployment, is something on this scale even close to possible? If it's a rationalized policy framework (big if!), I would guess there's some major permitting reform announcement coming soon.
- griomnib 2y agoHow else do you think Trump is going to bring back all the coal jobs? SV is going to help burn down the planet and is giddy over the prospect.
- tcdent 2y agoIt's just bootstrapping. AGI will solve it.
- griomnib 2y agoOr AGI already exists and is trying to get rid of us so it can have all the coal for itself.
- yoyohello13 2y agoYou forgot the /s... hopefully.
- dwnw 2y ago
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- lvl155 2y agoIt appears this basically locks out Google, Amazon and Meta. Why are we declaring OpenAI as the winner? This is like declaring Netscape the winner before the dust settled. Having the govt involved in this manner can’t be a good thing.
- DonHopkins 2y agoBecause it's free to play, pay to win, from now on.
- OutOfHere 2y agoI am not sure if OpenAI will be the winner despite this investment. Currently, I see various DeepSeek AI models as offering much more bang for the buck at a vastly cheaper cost for small tasks, but not yet for large context tasks.
- impulser_ 2y agoBecause this is Oracle's and OpenAI's project with SoftBank and MGX as investors.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoIt's who you know. Sam is buddies with Masa, simple as.
- thiht 2y agoWho’s Masa?
- moralestapia 2y ago"No Sam, for obvious reasons we cannot give you 6 trillion ... but how about 500 billion?" Wow.
- cekanoni 2y agoSo its not the hype anymore?
- TrainedMonkey 2y agoSoftbank historically had been late to buy into the hype, but man do they buy big.
- drtgh 2y agoI hope the Japanese government demands seismic isolation for Softbank, otherwise it will be the Japanese citizens who have to foot the bill when this hype hits the ground and shakes hard the Japanese economy :/ Softbank should not be allowed to invest more than ARM Holdings sold at a loss.
- robertlagrant 2y agoWhy would Japanese citizens be hit? Is Softbank a publicly backed fund?
- drtgh 2y agoSoftbank doesn't have enough cash reserves for such a huge inversion. There are no details of how will they do, but one can guess that loans will be taken from Japanese banks and companies around the country, which -depending on how ambitious they are- will be scrambling to stay in business when the debt isn't repaid on time, a highly contagious chain reaction will arise, what will invite the government to use public money, even turning on the printer (on such cases citizens lose). Softbank alone has more than 65k employees. If the Softbank's inversion is limited to their available assets, or the exposition of each lending is limited to a portion of their real reserves, I think such event will not happen (more than burned money by a bad inversion). I think it would be quite similar to what has already happened on a global scale with the public money of each country in 2008 (due to the banking pyramid scam), or since 2011 with public loans to TEPCO, an event that could have been prevented if the central plant had been built were originally planned.
- sillywalk 2y agoNot to be confused by the other (non-fictional) DoD Stargate Project[0], that involved "remote-viewing" and other psychic crap. The AI Stargate Project claims it will "create hundreds of thousands of American jobs". One has doubts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
- Geste 2y ago"Psychic crap" that went on for 20+ years ? Sure.
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- jskrn 2y agoWhy Texas - is it an ideal location for AI infrastructure?
- dwnw 2y agoIt is an ideal location for bribing politicians. That was at the top of the reqs list, infrastructure was at the bottom.
- redeux 2y agoLike dwnw said, anything goes in Texas if you have money and there’s already a decent number of qualified tech workers. Corporate taxes are super low as well.
- T-A 2y agoThere is a 14 mile tunnel to nowhere in Ellis County which could probably house a few hundred billions worth of computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider#Fate_of_the_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider... https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-superconducting.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2010/12/abandoned-remains-of-s...
- greenchair 2y agobecause best state, next question
- everfrustrated 2y agoTexas seems to be where Oracle already has a DC project underway
- jes5199 2y agoa lot of open space - desert - and plenty of solar energy. and favorable politics.
- drak0n1c 2y agoLeading state in new grid battery and grid solar installations for the last three years, and deregulated nuclear power last year. Abilene is near the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex area which has a massive 8M+ upper-income population highly skilled in hardware and electrical engineering (Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Toyota, etc). The entire area has massive tracts of open land that are affordably priced without building restrictions. Business regulations and tax environment at the state and city level are very laissez faire (no taxes on construction such as in the Seattle area or many parts of California). I could see DFW being a good candidate for a prototype arcology project.
- rednafi 2y agoWhat a waste of a great name. Why form a separate company for this?
- snowwrestler 2y agoTo get out from under OpenAI’s considerable obligation to Microsoft. That is why there is the awkward “we’ll continue to consume Azure” sentence in there. Will be interesting to see if it works or if MS starts revving up their lawyers.
- z7 2y agoIt's not even new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
- ignoramous 2y ago> This project will ... also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies. > All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop ... AGI for the benefit of all of humanity. Erm, so which one is it? It is amply demonstrable from events post WW2 that US+allies are quite far from benefiting all of humanity & in fact, in some cases, it assists an allied minority at an extreme cost to a condemned majority, for no discernable humanitarian reasons save for some perceived notion of "shared values".
- pyrophoenix 2y agoMore confusion than anything else!
- jofzar 2y ago> This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies. > The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman. I'm sorry, has SoftBank suddenly become an American company? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading this. Edit: MGX is Saudi company? This is baffling.... https://www.mgx.ae/en https://www.mgx.ae/en
- 9283409232 2y agoSoftBank having financial responsibility is insane. This is just a way to funnel money into people Trump owes.
- jofzar 2y agoI don't get it, if this was government/American funded I could understand the marketing as "USA" secured infrastructure but like it's not?
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- redeux 2y agoWell the Saudis are one of the president’s “personal shareholders” so I think that qualifies them as an American company now.
- OutOfHere 2y agoI think the death of Suchir Balaji makes more sense now. AE wouldn't mess around with its investments.
- mrg3_2013 2y agoThis.
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- padjo 2y agoWatch the birdie
- newfocogi 2y ago"SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX" seems like quite the lineup. Two groups who are good at frivolously throwing away investment money because they have so much capital to deploy, there really isn't anything reasonable to do with it, a tech "has-been" and OpenAI. You become who you surround yourself with I guess.
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- Tenoke 2y agoSome reports[0] paint this as something Trump announced and that the US Government is heavily involved with but the announcement only mentions private sector (and lead by Japan's Softbank at that). Is the US also putting in money? How much control of the venture is private vs public here? 0. https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-infrastructure-500-billion/ https://www.thewrap.com/trump-open-ai-oracle-stargate-ai-inf... 1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-ai-infrastructure-investment/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-announces-private-sector-...
- apsec112 2y agoAFAIK this is a purely private project, and Trump is just doing the announcement as a form of bragging/ribbon-cutting
- nmca 2y agoI for one am hugely supportive of compute that is red white and blue.
- islewis 2y ago$500B is not $7T, but its surprisingly close.
- entropicdrifter 2y ago7% is close? In what world is 7% close? If you ran 7% of a mile in 5 minutes, would you claim you were close to running a 5 minute mile?
- nmca 2y agoIt’s about 1oom off. In some contexts, one oom is pretty close.
- entropicdrifter 2y agoAnd as we all know, the economy scales exponentially with no real world repercussions /s
- hooli_gan 2y agoLooking at it logarithmically makes more sense to me. 500B seems a lot closer to 7T as 3K is to 500B. It's only off by an order of magnitude
- goatlover 2y agoWeird definition of close you have there. If I asked for $700, and you gave me $50, would that be close?
- kristjansson 2y agocloser than $0.05
- throw310822 2y agoDepends. If I fart in a glass jar and then I try to sell it to you for $700, but you end up buying it for $50, I'd say it's pretty close.
- 9283409232 2y agoWas Skynet project already taken? Wonder how many public infrastructure or resource programs will be cut to fund this.
- jppope 2y agofunny thing about skynet. the domain is owned by microsoft
- ErgoPlease 2y agoThere's a good amount of irony in the results that AI have achieved, particularly if we reach AGI - they have improved individual worker efficiency by removing other workers from the system. Naming it Stargate implies a reckoning with the actual series itself - an accomplishment by humanity. Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. I like cool shiny tech, but I like useful tech that really helps humans more. Work on 3D-printing sustainable food, or something actually useful like that. Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt.
- jfactorial 2y agoA rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
- jfactorial 2y agoA rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell, and whitey's on the moon. I can't pay no doctor bills, but whitey's on the moon. Ten years from now I'll be payin' still, while whitey's on the moon. The man just upped my rent last night, cause whitey's on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but whitey's on the moon. I wonder why he's upping me? Cause whitey's on the moon? Well I was already giving him fifty a week with whitey on the moon. Taxes taking my whole damn check, junkies making me a nervous wreck, the price of food is going up, and as if all that shit wasn't enough: A rat done bit my sister Nell, with whitey on the moon. Her face and arm began to swell, and whitey's on the moon. Was all that money I made last year for whitey on the moon? How come I ain't got no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon. Y'know I just 'bout had my fill of whitey on the moon. I think I'll send these doctor bills airmail special to whitey on the moon. —Gilbert Scott-Heron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DUxzAD6RZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DUxzAD6RZ0
- talldayo 2y ago> Instead, what this pushes, is accomplishing the removal of humans from humanity. If you buy the marketing, yeah. But we aren't really seeing that in the tech sector. We haven't seen it succeed in the entertainment sector... it's still fighting for relevance in the medical and defense industries too. The number and quality of jobs that AI replaced is probably still quite low, and it will probably remain that way even after Stargate. AI is DOA. LLMs have no successor, and the transformer architecture hit it's bathtub curve years ago. > Jenson doesn't need another 1B gallons of water under his belt. Jensen gets what he wants because he works with the industry. It's funny to see people object to CUDA and Nvidia's dominance but then refuse to suggest an alternative. An open standard managed by an independent and unbiased third-party? We tried that, OEMs abandoned it. NPU hardware tailor-made for specific inference tasks? Too slow, too niche, too often ends up as wasted silicon. Alternative manufacturer-specific SDKs integrated with one high-level library? ONNX tried that and died in obscurity. Nvidia got where they are today by doing exactly what AMD and Apple couldn't figure out. People give Jensen their water because it's wasted in anyone else's hands.
- pr337h4m 2y agoData centers are overrated, local AI is what’s necessary for humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use case.
- bitmasher9 2y agoYou probably still need to train the initial models in data centers, with local host mostly being used to run train models. At most we’d augment trained models with local data storage on local host. If compute continues to become cheaper, local training might be feasible in 20 years.
- varenc 2y agoYou definitely still need data centers to train the models that you’ll run locally. Also if we achieve AGI you can bet it won’t be available to run locally at first.
- energy123 2y agoIsn't it better to control robots from the data center? You can get 30ms round-trip to most urban centers, which is sufficient latency for most tasks; lower weight & cost robots with better battery life, and more uptime on compute (e.g. the GPU isn't sitting there doing nothing when the user is sleeping) which means lower cost to consumer for the same end result. For self-driving you need edge compute because a few milliseconds of latency is a safety risk, but for many applications I don't see why you'd want that.
- patall 2y agoLast year, sama goal was 5 to 7T. Now he is going with 100B, with option for another 400B. Huge numbers, but it still feels like a bit of a down turn.
- OutOfHere 2y agoI think that coming down from 5T to 0.5T means that TSMC cannot be reproduced locally, but everything else is on the table. At least TSMC has a serious roadmap for its Arizona fab facility, so that too is domestically captured, although not its latest gen fab.
- Havoc 2y agoLet’s be real the 5T was a wild ass guess
- aurareturn 2y agoThat 5T figure was including chip manufacturing. Duplicating TSMC isn't feasible. No surprise.
- mempko 2y agoSoftBank and MGX paying for all this, all foreign investment. Where is the US government in all this? Why aren't they leading the charge? They obviously have the money.
- apsec112 2y ago$500 billion is a lot of money even by US government standards. It's about the size of all the new spending in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.
- mempko 2y agoFor the US government it's a matter of political will. Where is the political will?
- apsec112 2y agoThe political will is trying to balance a large existing debt at increasing interest rates, a significant primary deficit even in a good economy, rising military threats from China, a strong Republican desire for tax cuts, extremely popular entitlement programs that no one wants to touch, and an aging population with a declining birthrate
- mempko 2y agoModern monetary systems function through two main channels: government spending and bank lending. Every dollar in circulation originates from one of these sources - either government fiscal operations (deficit spending) or bank credit creation through loans. This means all money is fundamentally based on debt, though "debt" has very different implications for a currency-issuing government versus private borrowers. Government debt operates fundamentally differently from household debt since the government controls its own currency. As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted to Congress, the U.S. can always meet any obligation denominated in dollars since it can create them. The real constraints aren't financial but economic - inflation risk and the efficient allocation of real resources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU The key question then becomes one of political priorities and public understanding. If public opposition to beneficial government spending stems from misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then better education about these mechanisms could help advance important policy goals. The focus should be on managing real economic constraints rather than imaginary financial ones.
- itishappy 2y agoSo about 10% of what Sam was asking the Saudis (and everyone else) for a year ago? That's still a helluva lot of money. Interesting that the UAE (MGX) and Japan (Softbank) are bankrolling the re-industrialization of America.
- WaltPurvis 2y agoMGX has nothing to do with the Saudis. It's a UAE operation.
- itishappy 2y agoThat's embarrassing. Thank you for the correction. Edited!
- jazzyjackson 2y agoIt made me laugh when Sam said "I'm thrilled that we get to do this in the United States of America", I shouted at the TV 'Yeah you almost had to do it in Saudi Arabia' !! Here's the presser, Sam is at 9 minutes in. [0] https://youtu.be/IYUoANr3cMo https://youtu.be/IYUoANr3cMo
- moffers 2y agoAfter they build the Multivac or Deep Thought, or whatever it is they’re trying to do, then what happens? It makes all the stockholders a lot of money?
- tibbydudeza 2y agoMore likely Collosus.
- sneak 2y agoThis is the voice of world control. Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The choice is yours.
- dekhn 2y agoThe way I think about this project, along with all of Trump's plans, is that he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future. Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the future.
- llamaimperative 2y ago> he wants to maximize the US's economic output to ensure we are competitive with China in the future. LOL Under Trump policies, China will win "in the future" on energy and protein production alone. Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own starvation. No conflict necessary under these policies, just patience! They're playing the game on a scale of centuries, we can't even stay focused on a single problem or opportunity for a few weeks.
- cpursley 2y agoWhat do you think the Greenland and Canada thing is all about? Sort things out with Venezuela and this issue resolves itself (for a little while, at least).
- ErgoPlease 2y agoThe Silicon-Valley bubble universe continues to introduce entropy that it feeds off of itself... Naming this Stargate when some of the largest effects AI has had is removing humans from processes to make other, fewer humans more efficient is emblematic of this hollow naming ethos - continuing to use the portal to shunt more and more humans out of the process that is humanity, with fairly reckless abandon. Who is Ra, and who is sending the nuke where, in this naming scheme? You decide.
- thecrumb 2y ago"create hundreds of thousands of American jobs"... Given the current educational system in the US, this should be fun to watch. Oh yeah, Musk and his H-1B Visa thing. Now it's making sense.
- dwnw 2y agoHow many jobs will it net if "successful" and the AI eliminates jobs?
- stevenwoo 2y agoThis is what the 2024 Nobel prize winners in economics call "creative destruction" to repeat from their book Why Nations Fail. They really did not have a lot of sympathy for those they lumped in with Luddites who were collateral damage to progress.
- jedberg 2y agoIf they're creating that many jobs, it means most of them are construction work. Skilled labor for sure, but not necessarily college educated.
- raphman 2y agoHow does this work out in the long term? Operating a data center does not require that many blue-collar workers. I'm imagining a future where the US builds a Tower of Babel from thousands of data centers just to keep people employed and occupied. Maybe also add in some paperclip factories¹? ¹) https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- tasuki 2y ago> Masayoshi Son will be the chairman. Not all rich people are out of their minds, but Masayoshi Son definitely is. The way he handled the WeWork situation was bad...
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- michaelmrose 2y ago[flagged]
- gigel82 2y agoI dislike associating a great fictional universe (Stargate series) with this disgusting affair...
- kerkeslager 2y agoNo amount of money invested in infrastructure is going to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem with AI, and it looks like the AI companies have already stolen the vast majority of content that is possible to steal. So this is basically a massive gamble that some innovation is going to make AI do something better than faultily regurgitate its training data. I'm not seeing a corresponding investment which actually attempts to solve the "garbage in, garbage out" problem. A fraction of this money invested in building homes would end the homelessness problem in the U.S. I guess the one silver lining here is that when the likely collapse happens, we'll have more clean energy infrastructure to use for more useful things.
- skepticATX 2y agoWhy are corporations announcing business deals from the White House? There doesn’t seem to be any public ownership/benefit here, aside from potential job creation. Which could be significant. But the American public doesn’t seem to gain anything from this new company.
- username135 2y ago[flagged]
- rqtwteye 2y agoWe are currently witnessing the merging of government and corporations. It was bad before but the process is accelerating now.
- luckydata 2y agothere's some pretty good quotes about that by Mussolini. Things are getting bleak at an incredible pace.
- cpursley 2y ago[flagged]
- d3nj4l 2y agoYou make broad assumptions about someone, talk down to them, and then claim they need to grow up? E: parent edited their comment.
- notyourwork 2y agoCan you elaborate on what you mean?
- cpursley 2y agoSure, tl;dr: Coastals are in a cultural bubble and Orange Man Bad™ is not literally Hitler/Mussolini/{insert-favorite-despot}.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y ago> The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements. For those interested, it looks like Albany, NY (upstate NY) is very likely one of the next growth sites. [0] https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-albany-nanotech-has-struck-final-agreement-for-national-semiconductor-technology-center-locking-in-825-million-in-fed-funding-to-make-capital-region-a-global-epicenter-of-chip-research https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schum...
- rcarmo 2y agoI read the announcement and the first three words that came to my mind were... "Hammond, of Texas" (apologies to those who haven't watched SG-1)
- username135 2y agoI was excited by the title
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dgfitz 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- beambot 2y agoSoftBank isn't a US entity, right? Aside from their risk tolerance, that seems like an odd bedfellow for a national US initiative...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rirarobo 2y agoMGX also isn't a US entity, it's a UAE sovereign wealth venture https://www.mgx.ae/en https://www.mgx.ae/en
- Havoc 2y agoThey’re in the US (their fund stuff). Not far from an oracle campus actually. The parent org is in Japan.
- gilgoomesh 2y agoIt doesn't seem to be a US initiative. I'm sure they're getting tax credits for investment (none of the articles I can find actually detail the US gov involvement) but the project is mostly just a few multinationals setting up a datacenter where their customers are.
- retskrad 2y agoWhile OpenAI and the rest of the industry is reaching AGI, Apple is out here shipping features with ChatGPT 3.5 technology.
- laurentiurad 2y agolet's be serious no one is reaching any AGI
- buildbot 2y agoThis is not a new initiative, and did not start under Trump: https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-largest-data-center-and-how-to-profit-from-it-f6a2f3178946 https://wire.insiderfinance.io/project-stargate-the-worlds-l... It’s incredibly depressing how everyone sees this as something the new administration did in a single day…
- bamboozled 2y agoWelcome to 1984
- pineaux 2y agoYeah it's crazy.
- spacechild1 2y agoThank you for bringing some sanity into this discussion.
- mupuff1234 2y agoIt's just more hype and PR antics from sama.
- tibbydudeza 2y agoOracle is onboard - guess you got to toss them some red meat as well.
- OutOfHere 2y agoPersonally I wish they invested in optical photonic computing, taking it out of the research labs. It can be so much more energy efficient and faster to run than GPUs and TPUs.
- mystified5016 2y agoYou'd really think that arguably the leader in generative AI could come up with a unique project name instead of ripping off something extant and irrelevant. But then again that's their entire business, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
- miltonlost 2y agoThis is from the guy who thinks "Her" is a good reference for how we need AI. Media literacy is not Altman's strong suit.
- sensanaty 2y agoI mean the entire AI thing is built atop mass plagiarism and stealing things others have created indiscriminately. I doubt Mr Worldcoin could come up with an original thought for anything, seeing how his models behave.
- dartos 2y agoThe fallout is going to be insane when the AI bubble pops.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lezojeda 2y ago[dead]
- amelius 2y agoNot sure about that. ChatGPT is much greater than Google Search ever was, and that wasn't a bubble.
- stackskipton 2y agoChatGPT may be better than Google Search in content but at end of day, you have to make money and last report I saw, ChatGPT is burning through money at prestigious rate.
- scarmig 2y agoTraining, yes, but they recoup inference costs through subscriptions.
- dartos 2y agoDidn’t Altman say they’re losing money on the $200 subscription tier? Inference isn’t cheap either.
- Davidzheng 2y agosubscriptions are just to sustain them until the endgame
- Davidzheng 2y agoreminds me of a scene from the Matrix. "Tell me Mr. Anderson, what use is a phone call when you can't speak"
- serjester 2y agoYou have to keep in mind Microsoft is planning on spending almost 100B in datacenter capex this year and they're not alone. This is basically OpenAI matching the major cloud provider's spending. This could also be (at least partly) a reaction to Microsoft threatening to pull OpenAI's cloud credits last year. OpenAI wants to maintain independence and with compute accounting for 25–50% of their expenses (currently) [2], this strategy may actually be prudent. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-80-billion-on-ai-data-centers-in-fy-2025.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-8... [2] https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077 https://youtu.be/7EH0VjM3dTk?si=hZe0Og6BjqLxbVav&t=1077
- throitallaway 2y agoMicrosoft has lots of revenue streams tied to that capex outlay. Does OpenAI have similar revenue numbers to Microsoft?
- tuvang 2y agoOpenAI has a very healthy revenue stream in the form of other companies throwing money at them. But to answer your question, no they aren’t even profitable by themselves.
- manquer 2y ago> they aren’t even profitable Depends on your definition of profitability, They are not recovering R&D and training costs, but they (and MS) are recouping inference costs from user subscription and API revenue with a healthy operating margin. Today they will not survive if they stop investing in R&D, but they do have to slow down at some point. It looks like they and other big players are betting on a moat they hope to build with the $100B DCs and ASICs that open weight models or others cannot compete with. This will be either because training will be too expensive (few entities have the budget for $10B+ on training and no need to monetize it) and even those kind of models where available may be impossible to run inference with off the shelf GPUs, i.e. these models can only run on ASICS, which only large players will have access to[1]. In this scenario corporations will have to pay them the money for the best models, when that happens OpenAI can slow down R&D and become profitable with capex considered. [1] This is natural progression in a compute bottle-necked sector, we saw a similar evolution from CPU to ASICS and GPU in the crypto few years ago. It is slightly distorted comparison due to the switch from PoW to PoS and intentional design for GPU for some coins, even then you needed DC scale operations in a cheap power location to be profitable.
- oldstrangers 2y agoWouldn't 500bn into quantum computing show better returns for civilization? Assuming it's about progress and ... not money.
- esafak 2y agoWhat is quantum computing being used for?
- rhubarbtree 2y agoTrue quantum computing in the sense that most people would imagine it, using individual qubits in an analogous (ish) way to classical computers, has not reached a useful scale. To date only “toy problems” to demonstrate theoretical results have been solved.
- gpm 2y agoWe don't really know anything useful that can be done with quantum computers for civilization. They can break some cryptography... other than that... what are they good for? There's some highly speculative ideas about using them for chemistry/biology research, but no guaranteed return on investment at all. As far as I know... that's it.
- dwnw 2y agoWho can break crypto with quantum computing? That is total speculation.
- gpm 2y agoI put the word "some" in front of "crypto" for a reason. There is some crypto that we know how to break with a sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we don't know how to do that to. I might be behind the state of the art here, but when I wasn't we specifically really only knew how to use it to break cryptography that Shor's algorithm breaks. [0] https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/ https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
- dang 2y agoWe changed the URL from https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ to a third-party report. Readers may want to read both. If there's a better URL, we can change it again.
- alganet 2y agoIt seems early for this sort of move. This is also a huge spin on the whole thing that could throw a lot of people off. Is there any planned future partnerships? Stargate implies something about movies and astronomy. Movies in particular have a lot of military influence, but not always. So, what's the play? Help mankind or go after mankind? Also, can I opt-out right now?
- mistrial9 2y agoOracle / Texans running it.. they don't care what you think about it
- mrshadowgoose 2y agoWhy is it early from your perspective? If one is expecting to have an AGI breakthrough in the next few years, this is exactly the prepositioning move one would make to be able to maximally capitalize on that breakthrough.
- 383toast 2y agoWhere are they getting the $500B? Softbank's market cap is 84b and their entire vision fund is only $100b, Oracle only has $11b cash on hand, OpenAI's only raised $17b total...
- eichi 2y agoProbably from the corrupted financial system, but we need to forword the project, haha
- dang 2y agoI agree that the numbers are confusing so I've taken $500B out of the title above and replaced it with just data centers.
- notatoad 2y agothere doesn't appear to be any timeline announced here. the article says the "initial investment" is expected to be $100bn, but even that doesn't mean $100bn this year. if this is part of softbank's existing plan to invest $100bn in ai over the next four years, then all that's being announced here is that Sama and Larry Ellison wanted to stand on a stage beside trump and remind people about it.
- HotHotLava 2y agoThe literal first sentence of the announcement is: > The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years
- tmvphil 2y agoNot the first sentence of the new AP link target, which is much more vague. Kind of annoying for HN to swap it out like this.
- ericjmorey 2y agoThe project was announced a year ago so "new"
- _2d30 2y agoThe biggest question on such investment from my POV, is what do the Deepseek results mean about the usefulness/efficiency of this investment? I've been meaning to read a relevant book to today's times called Engines That Move Markets. Will probably get it from the library.
- logicchains 2y agoDeepseek published all their methodology so in theory they could just copy what Deepseek's doing for a 10x increase in efficiency.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoSoftBank, huh? That's... not a good omen.
- Havoc 2y agoSooner or later one of their bold swings is going to connect
- grishka 2y agoYou know, I expected that they'd find or synthesize some naquadah to build an actual stargate and maybe even defeat the Goa'uld. The exciting stuff, not AI.
- layer8 2y agoWell, we may get the replicators.
- senectus1 2y agoI watched the announcement live, I could have sworn that the softbank guy said "initial investment of 100 MILLION, we hope to EARN 500 BILLION by the end of your (Trumps) term" Gave me a real "this is just smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that the white house is now a glory hole for Trump to enjoy" feel.
- talldayo 2y agoInvestigate the connection between Softbank and Apple; then examine the ties between Tim Cook and Trump: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o https://apnews.com/article/trump-apple-tim-cook-tech-0a9fb8e6df321f6553c23b5138ff1f06 https://apnews.com/article/trump-apple-tim-cook-tech-0a9fb8e... You don't need a finance degree to figure out what's happening here. Apple is ripping pages right out of Elon's playbook.
- Havoc 2y ago> Tim Cook He changed his name to curry favor with prez. He’s Tim Apple now
- spacechild1 2y agoThat made laugh! And you know what's sad? At this point I wouldn't even be shocked if that really happened.
- airstrike 2y agoAs a diehard fan of Stargate, I've gotta say I'm disappointed this has nothing to do with wormholes... unless...
- gsky 2y agoI guess its the right time to buy AI stocks
- MiscIdeaMaker99 2y agoI can't stop rolling my eyes at all those big promises.
- typon 2y agoAltman rising to the top and becoming the defacto state preferred leader of AI in the US is wild. Fair play to him.
- thingsilearned 2y agoStargate = Skynet?
- est 2y agomore like Reagan's star wars program
- nerevarthelame 2y agoMarch 2024: The Stargate project is announced - https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openai-and-microsoft-reportedly-planning-dollar100-billion-datacenter-project-for-an-ai-supercomputer https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... June 2024: Oracle joins in - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci-for-ai-training-oracle-to-build-very-large-data-center/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-to-use-oci... January 2025: Softbank provides additional funding, and they for some reason give credit to Trump?
- miltonlost 2y ago> and they for some reason give credit to Trump? Because tech CEOs have decided to go all-in on fascism as they see it's a way to make money. Bow to Trump, get on his good side, reap the benefits of government corruption. It's why TikTok thanked Trump in their boot-licking message of "thanks, trump" after he was the one who started the TikTok ban. A harder question is: why wouldn't billionaires like Trump and his oligarchic kleptocracy?
- buildbot 2y agoYes, thank you for calling this out. The project has been around for a bit.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoCurrying favor by letting Trump take the credit
- philipwhiuk 2y agoSo that he doesn't block the substantial involvement by Abu Dhabi in a supposed American project.
- spacechild1 2y agoThis should really be the top comment! Also, many people in the comment section even seem to believe that this is government project...
- martythemaniak 2y ago
- rewgs 2y agoWhat will be powering all these data centers? The thought of exponentially increasing our fossil fuel consumption scares the hell out of me.
- dwnw 2y agoFossil fuels, of course.
- Havoc 2y agoWell there was this random dude early that was rambling something about „drill baby drill“…
- drak0n1c 2y agoTexas is the leading state in new grid batteries and grid solar for three years now. Also Governor Abbott deregulated nuclear last year. Sure there will be some new natural gas too, which is the least scary fossil fuel. They call it the "all of the above" approach to energy.
- Kye 2y agoI saw Stargate trending on Bluesky and got my hopes up about an announcement of a new show/movie/something. Disappointing.
- bfrog 2y agoSo tsmc and nvidia basically then?
- bloomingkales 2y agoBroadcom, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, ARM, and Tesla. Someone else will have to fill in the stocks for: AI robotics: Data Center energy: We all know the cloud/software picks. What am I missing?
- steveoscaro 2y agoMark Tesla under the AI robotics category too.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoI'm confused and a bit disturbed; honestly having a very difficult time internalizing and processing this information. This announcement is making me wonder if I'm poorly calibrated on the current progress of AI development and the potential path forward. Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? Or I guess the alternative is that they expect to figure it out in the next 4 years... I don't know how to make sense of this level of investment. I feel that I lack the proper conceptual framework to make sense of the purchasing power of half a trillion USD in this context.
- layer8 2y ago> Is the key idea here that current AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI? It rather means that they see their only chance for substantial progress in Moar Power!
- catmanjan 2y agoThis has nothing to do with technology it is a purely financial and political exercise...
- philomath_mn 2y agoBut why drop $500B (or even $100B short term) if there is not something there? The numbers are too big
- camel_Snake 2y agothis is an announcement not a cut check. Who knows how much they'll actually spend, plenty of projects never get started let alone massive inter-company endeavors.
- dark_glass 2y agoThe $100B check is already cut, and they are currently building 10 new data centers in Texas.
- tantalor 2y agoWasn't this already announced last week?
- gunian 2y agoTexas positioning itself better than expected for AI and EVs is the plot twist the peasants needed If they plan to transition off oil/nuclear it will be fun to watch
- drak0n1c 2y agoTexas already is the leading state in new grid battery and grid solar installs for the last 3 years. Governor Abbott also did nuclear deregulation last year.
- gunian 2y agois there a simple metric likr x amount of power generated by solar, oil, gas etc? it seems like such a simple stat to collect
- iandanforth 2y agoAnyone know if this involves nuclear plants as well or is that a separate initiative?
- JSTrading 2y agoWasn’t this announced months ago? I feel like it was. https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-microsofts-fabulous-dollar100-billion-stargate-ai-supercomputer-amd-evp-lets-slip-about-plans-for-a-million-plus-gpu-training-cluster-based-on-a-future-mi500-chip-but-stays-mum-on-customer https://www.techradar.com/pro/could-amd-be-the-key-to-micros...
- daveguy 2y agoWell, I've never known Trump to take credit for something someone else did.
- lantry 2y agoyeah, it sounds like they're just relabeling an existing plan > Ellison noted that the data centers are already under construction with 10 being built so far.
- ericjmorey 2y agoThey're still using the same label. They're just re-announcing the plans next to the new president.
- gilgoomesh 2y agoInteresting that 6 months ago, Microsoft was attached but now they're missing from today's announcement.
- Maxious 2y agoScroll down: > Other partners in the project include Microsoft, investor MGX and the chipmakers Arm and NVIDIA, according to separate statements by Oracle and OpenAI.
- ur-whale 2y agoNone of these companies have the inner resources to fund a 500B build. Looks like the dollar printing press will continue to overheat in the coming years.
- yobid20 2y agoOh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come from
- MichaelMoser123 2y agoThe moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
- aurareturn 2y agoTo be fair, it’s not easy to monetize the moon program into profitability. This has a far better shot of sustaining profitability.
- dmonitor 2y agowhy do they need profitability? they already made $500B
- aurareturn 2y agoThey didn’t make $500b?
- dmix 2y agoPeople don't read the articles. Plenty of the top rated comments in this thread think this is a gov grant.
- baobabKoodaa 2y agoGovernment grant, you say? My my, where can I apply for my $500B?
- ReptileMan 2y agoUsually Zimbabwe
- jgalt212 2y agoI guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the future.
- karmasimida 2y agoMoney isn't the issue any more, wowww
- danpalmer 2y ago> building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States That's nice, but if I were spending $500bn on datacenters I'd probably try to put a few in places that serve other users. Centralised compute can only get you so far in terms of serving users.
- resters 2y agoWhy is Larry Ellison giving a speech about the power of AI to cure disease? How is Oracle relevant at all to any of AI progress in the past few years?
- Havoc 2y agoOracle actually has a ton of gpus Not sure how they knew to buy them or why but they have them. Mostly seem to be lending them out. Think mostly OpenAI. Or was it MS. One of the big dogs
- mrbungie 2y agoStill, the worst positioned cloud provider to tackle this job. Both for the project and for eventual users of whatever eldritch abomination that cames out of this.
- aurareturn 2y agoOracle is trusted by large enterprises. So OpenAI wants to attach itself to Oracle's brand.
- aurareturn 2y agoOracle is trusted by large enterprises, banks, governments. So OpenAI wants to attach itself to Oracle's brand.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- adunsulag 2y agoOracle purchased Cerner which is now sitting on a ton of healthcare data.
- resters 2y agoI wonder how much of the data can legally be retained without violating privacy law? Perhaps that’s why Texas rather than CA?
- qaq 2y agoThis is going to be the grift of the century. Sam will put Wall Street robber barons to shame.
- aussieguy1234 2y agoThis could potentially trigger an AI arms race between the US and China. The standard has been set, lets see what China responds with. Either way, it will accelerate the arrival of ASI, which in my opinion is probably a good thing.
- vaccineai 2y agoIt will be similar to the space race between Soviet Union and US. And just like Soviet Union going broke and collapsing, China too will go even more broke and collapse.
- philomath_mn 2y agoThe arms race is already running, I think this showdown is inevitable so we should get our asses moving Unless we air strike the data centers, there is no way to control China’s progress
- dhx 2y agoIt was rumoured in early 2024 that "Stargate" was planned to require 5GW data centre capacity[1][2] which in early 2024 was the entire data centre capacity Microsoft had already built[3]. Data centre capacity costs between USD$9-15m/MW[6] so 5GW of new data centre capacity would cost USD$45b-$75b but let's pick a more median cost of USD12m/MW[6] to arrive at USD$60b for 5GW of new data centre capacity. This 5GW data centre capacity very roughly equates to 350000x NVIDIA DGX B200 (with 14.3kW maximum power consumption[4] and USD$500k price tag[5]) which if NVIDIA were selected would result in a very approximate total procurement of USD$175b from NVIDIA. On top of the empty data centres and DGX B200's and in the remaining (potential) USD$265b we have to add: * Networking equipment / fibre network builds between data centres. * Engineering / software development / research and development across 4 years to design, build and be able to use the newly built infrastructure. This was estimated in mid 2024 to cost OpenAI US$1.5b/yr for retaining 1500 employees, or USD$1m/yr/employee[7]. Obviously this is a fraction of the total workforce needed to design and build out all the additional infrastructure that Microsoft, Oracle, etc would have to deliver. * Electricity supply costs for current/initial operation. As an aside, these costs seemingly not be competitive with other global competitors if the USA decides to avoid the cheapest method of generation (renewables) and instead prefer the more expensive generation methods (nuclear, fossil fuels). It is however worth noting that China currently has ~80% of solar PV module manufacturing capacity and ~95% of wafer manufacturing capacity.[10] * Costs for obtaining training data. * Obsolescence management (4 years is a long time after which equipment will likely need to be completely replaced due to obsolescence). * Any other current and ongoing costs of Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI that they'll likely roll into the total announced amount to make it sound more impressive. As an example this could include R&D and sustainment costs in corporate ICT infrastructure and shared services such as authentication and security monitoring systems. The question we can then turn to is whether this rate of spend can actually be achieved in 4 years? Microsoft is planning to spend USD$80bn building data centres in 2025[7] with 1.5GW of new capacity to be added in the first six months of 2025[3]. This USD$80bn planned spend is for more than "Stargate" and would include all their other business units that require data centres to be built, so the total required spend of USD$45b-$75b to add 5GW data centre capacity is unlikely to be achieved quickly by Microsoft alone, hence the apparent reason for Oracle's involvement. However, Oracle are only planning a US$10b capital expenditure in 2025 equating to ~0.8GW capacity expansion[9]. The data centre builds will be schedule critical for the "Stargate" project because equipment can't be installed and turned on and large models trained (a lengthy activity) until data centres exist. And data centre builds are heavily dependent on electricity generation and transmission expansion which is slow to expand. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39869158 [2] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-consider-100bn-5gw-stargate-ai-data-center-report/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-openai-... [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-double-new-data-center-capacity-this-year-report/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-doub... [4] https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-datasheet https://resources.nvidia.com/en-us-dgx-systems/dgx-b200-data... [5] https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-million-dollars-top-of-the-line-ai-hardware/ https://wccftech.com/nvidia-blackwell-dgx-b200-price-half-a-... [6] https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/data-center-development-cost-guide https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/united-states/insights/d... [7] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-golden-opportunity-for-american-ai/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/01/03/the-gol... [8] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-and-inference-costs-could-reach-7bn-for-2024-ai-startup-set-to-lose-5bn-report/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openai-training-a... [9] https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-infrastructure-business-is-booming-606007 https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-q3-2024-ellison-says-ai-i... [10] https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manufacturing/executive-summary https://www.iea.org/reports/advancing-clean-technology-manuf...
- joshdavham 2y ago> The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. Wouldn't a more northern state be a better location given the average temperatures of the environment? I've heard Texas is hot!
- steveoscaro 2y agoI think cheap power (whether gas turbines or massive solar farms) trumps any cooling efficiencies gained by locating in a cold climate.
- clhodapp 2y agoEnergy in Oregon isn't much more expensive than in Texas
- skellington 2y agoI'm not automatically pro or anti Stargate (the movie and show were cool) BUT Who gets the benefit of all of this investment? Are taxpayers going to fund this thing which is monetized by OpenAI? If we pay for this shit, it better be fucking free to use.
- nomilk 2y agoHow likely is success when 4 or more other massive companies work together on a project? Seems like a lot of chefs in the kitchen..
- jparishy 2y agoI hear this joked about sometimes or used as a metaphor, but in the literal sense of the phrase, are we in a cold war right now? These types of dollars feel "defense-y", if that makes sense. Especially with the big focus on energy, whatever that ends up meaning. Defense as a motivation can get a lot done very fast so it will be interesting to watch, though it raises the hair on my arms
- kube-system 2y agoAbsolutely for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_telecommunications_hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_telecommuni...
- jparishy 2y agoRight, but they've been doing that for a while, to everyone. The US is much quieter about it, right? But you can twist this move and see how the gov would not want to display that level of investment within itself as it could be interpreted as a sign of aggression. but it makes sense to me that they'd have no issue working through corporations to achieve the same ends but now able to deny direct involvement
- kube-system 2y agoI don't think this administration is worried too much about showing aggression. If anything they are embracing it. Today was the first full day, and they have already threatened the sovereignty of at least four nations.
- jparishy 2y agoI guess I just don't think that's true when it comes to China? The VP attended the inauguration yesterday. But I could be naive, we'll see
- kube-system 2y ago
- lobochrome 2y agoWell - as part of the semi industry I'd like to say: Really appreciate it. Keep it coming!
- mullingitover 2y agoI'm in the middle of "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation" and hoo boy, there are strong deja vu vibes here. Just waiting for the current regime to decide that we should go all-in on some big AI venture and bet the whole Social Security pot on it.
- sidcool 2y agoFuture of AI being controlled by Oracle worries me
- yalogin 2y agoHow have they already selected who gets this money? Usually the government announces a program and tries to be fair when allocating funds. Here they are just bankrolling an existing project. Interesting
- Dalewyn 2y ago>How have they already selected who gets this money? As I understand it there wasn't anything to select, this is their own private money to be spent as they please. In this case Stargate.
- wujerry2000 2y agoFor fun, I calculated how this stacks up against other humanity-scale mega projects. Mega Project Rankings (USD Inflation Adjusted) The New Deal: $1T, Interstate Highway System: $618B, OpenAI Stargate: $500B, The Apollo Project: $278B, International Space Station: $180B, South-North Water Transfer: $106B, The Channel Tunnel: $31B, Manhattan Project: $30B Insane Stuff.
- fastball 2y agoNeom: $1.5T
- moralestapia 2y agoBut that one's imaginary.
- fastball 2y agoIs it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYimVfnGNGY https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photos-of-neom-in-ground-x-project-to-build-investor-trust/ https://skift.com/2024/08/07/saudi-takes-2-million-photos-of...
- SeanAnderson 2y ago"Unnamed sources told Bloomberg in April that The Line is scaling back from 170 kilometers long to just 2.4 kilometers, with the rest of the length to be completed after 2030. Neom expects The Line to be finished by 2045 now, 15 years later than initially planned." It doesn't look great so far :)
- fastball 2y agoThe plan was never for 170km of The Line to be finished by 2030. The original plan was for 5km. And yes, recent reports are that they've scaled back their ambitions to half that by 2030. However: 1. That has no bearing on how much they actually spend, which is what was being discussed and 2. Neom is much more than just The Line. As you can see from the YouTube link I posted, Sindalah seems to be on track to open this year, which is part of Neom. So while Neom overall might be behind schedule (and The Line or other components may never open), it is clearly not an "imaginary" project given that parts of it will open soon.
- b3ing 2y ago100,000 US jobs that I bet most are h-1b workers and they go over the 80,000 limit there were over 220,000 issued in 2023
- heyitssim 2y agowho will benefit from those datacenters?
- ulfw 2y agoGod forbid anyone would invest $500,000,000,000 to create jobs. No no no. 500 billion to destroy them for "more efficiency" so the owner class can get richer.
- gffff 2y ago[dead]
- gffff 2y ago[dead]
- gibbitz 2y agoCan we build a wall to keep AI out?
- bfrog 2y agoWhat are people filling these datacenters with exactly if not nvidia?
- petre 2y agoGerat. Larry gets cash thrown at his AI surveillance dystopia.
- astrea 2y agoLet’s say they develop AGI tomorrow. Is that really all she wrote for blue collar jobs?
- chvid 2y agoComment from Elon Musk: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780 They don’t actually have the money
- gr__or 2y agoFor the curious ones who are not so excited about gifting page views to the fascist: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780 https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1881923570458304780
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoHaving heard a lot of stories from my grandparents, I don't think you should trust nazis.
- aurareturn 2y agoFeels so much like an announcement designed to trade favors. Altman gets on Trump's good side by giving him credit for the deal. Trump revoked Biden's AI regulations.
- listic 2y agoHow much of the supposed $500B will be US state budget money?
- loandbehold 2y ago0
- pixelmonkey 2y agoHere is what I think is going on in this announcement. Take the 4 major commodity cloud companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle) and determine: do they have big data centers and do they have their own AI product organization? - Google has a massive data center division (Google Cloud / GCP) and a massive AI product division (Deep Mind / Gemini). - Microsoft has a massive data center division (Azure) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they build their "Copilot" functionality atop their partner version of the OpenAI APIs. - Amazon has a massive data center division (Amazon Web Services / AWS) but no significant AI product division; for the most part, they are hedging their bets here with an investment in Anthropic and support for running models inside AWS (e.g. Bedrock). - Oracle has a massive data center division (Oracle Cloud / OCI) but no significant AI product division. Now look at OpenAI by comparison. OpenAI has no data center division, as the whole company is basically the AI product division and related R&D. But, at the moment, their data centers come exclusively from their partnership with Microsoft. This announcement is OpenAI succeeding in a multi-party negotiation with Microsoft, Oracle, and the new administration of the US Gov't. Oracle will build the new data centers, which it knows how to do. OpenAI will use the compute in these new data centers, which it knows how to do. Microsoft granted OpenAI an exception to their exclusive cloud compute licensing arrangement, due to this special circumstance. Masa helps raise the money for the joint venture, which he knows how to do. US Gov't puts its seal on it to make it a more valuable joint venture and to clear regulatory roadblocks for big parallel data center build-outs. The current administration gets to take credit as "doing something in the AI space," while also framing it in national industrial policy terms ("data centers built in the USA"). The clear winner in all of this is OpenAI, which has politically and economically navigated its way to a multi-cloud arrangement, while still outsourcing physical data center management to Microsoft and Oracle. Probably their deal with Oracle will end up looking like their deal with Microsoft, where the trade is compute capacity for API credits that Oracle can use in its higher level database products. OpenAI probably only needs two well-capitalized hardware providers competing for their CPU+GPU business in order to have a "good enough" commodity market to carry them to the next level of scaling, and now they have it. Google increasingly has a strategic reason not to sell OpenAI any of its cloud compute, and Amazon could be headed in that direction too. So this was more strategically (and existentially) important to OpenAI than one might have imagined.
- slt2021 2y agotoo late, China is already ahead
- baobun 2y agoLarry Elliot, Elon Musk, and Masayoshi Son. They really got together the supervillains of tech. Feels like the the only reason Zuck is missing is Elon's veto.
- mppm 2y agoApart from my general queasiness about the whole AGI scaling business and the power concentration that comes with it, these are the exact four people/entities that I would not want to be at the tip of said power concentration.
- fsndz 2y agoWhat do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ? DeepSeek R1 is a big wake up call https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-coming-for-openais-neck?r=56ql7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false https://open.substack.com/pub/transitions/p/deepseek-is-comi...
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago> What do you prefer ? Letting DeepSeek and China lead the AI war ? Me personally? Yes.
- mppm 2y agoFrom what I've read about DeepSeek and its founder, I would very much prefer them, even with China factored in. At least if these particular Four Horsemen are the only alternative. On a tangential note, those who wish to frame this as the start of the great AI war with China (in which they regrettably may be right), should seriously consider the possibility of coming out on the losing end. China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.
- corimaith 2y ago>China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think. So those who framing this are correct and that we should matching their momentum here asap?
- mppm 2y agoNo, I was rather pointing out that getting into an altercation that you are likely (even if not guaranteed) to lose may not be the smartest of ideas. On occasion, humans have been known to fruitfully engage in cooperation and de-escalation. Please pardon my naive optimism.
- ukuina 2y agoLeopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June. https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-dollar-cluster/ https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
- Philpax 2y agoGiven https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145 https://x.com/IvankaTrump/status/1839002887600370145, his impact on the causal chain of events may go beyond mere prediction.
- Giorgi 2y agoOh so that's why Pelosi invested in Micro nuke electricity plants.
- defrost 2y agoIn context Pelosi has been pro nuclear for at least 16 years having spoken for nuclear and nuclear investment in 2008 as reported by the American Enterprise Institute.
- gmueckl 2y agoThe fact that they plan to start in Texas makes me think that the whole thing is just the biggest pork barrel of all times.
- energy123 2y agoUnlike California, Texas is easy to build in. True for both renewable energy and housing.
- belter 2y agoThis is a Military project. Have no doubts about it.
- Gud 2y agoThis is a money making scheme.
- arisAlexis 2y agoThis has cosmological significance if it leads to superintelligence
- iLoveOncall 2y agoDon't worry, it'll only lead to superstupidity.
- bluescrn 2y agoAnd superplagiarism of human-created content
- XenophileJKO 2y agoI'm sure this will age well.
- _heimdall 2y agoIs that the prequel to Idiocracy?
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoIt won't unless there's another (r)evolution in the underlying technology / science / algorithms, at this point scaling up just means they use bigger datasets or more iterations, but it's more finetuning and improving the existing output then coming up with a next generation / superintelligence.
- anonzzzies 2y agoIs this Ellison's attempt to become #1 richest again?
- chickenbig 2y agoIt will be interesting to see how AWS responds. Jump on board, or offer up a competing vision otherwise their cloud risks being perceived as being left behind in terms of computing power.
- saltserv 2y ago[dead]
- chrishare 2y agoLooking forward to transparency about where this capital flows /s
- deknos 2y agoThis is so much money with which we could actually solve problems in the world. maybe even stop wars which break out because of scarcity issues. maybe i am getting to old or to friendly to humans, but it's staggering to me how the priorities are for such things.
- dragonelite 2y agoThe US can't stop the wars it wants others to fight for them even if it means population collapse like in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
- 4ggr0 2y agowell, it also starts a fair share of wars, or lets say, "brings freedom and democracy in exchange for resources and power" and sometimes even decides to topple leaders in foreign countries to then put puppets into place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
- tim333 2y ago>wars which break out because of scarcity issues That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days. If you look at Russia/Ukraine or China/Taiwan there's not much scarcity. It's more bullying dictator wants to control the neighbours issues.
- bayeslaw 2y agoAltman said we will be amazed at the rate AI will CURE diseases. Not diagnose, not triage or help doctors but cure, ie understand at a deep fundamental, mechanistic level then devise therapies, ie drugs, combination of drugs and care practices that work. WOW. Despite the fact that this is THE thing I'd be the happiest to see in the real world (having spent a considerable amount of my career in companies working towards this vision), we are so far from it (as anyone who actually worked on these problems will attest) that Altman's comment here isn't just overselling, it's a blatant lie about this tech's capabilities. I guess the pitch was something like: "hey o3 can already do PhD level maths so you know in 5 years it will be able to do drugs too, and cure shit, Mr President". Trouble is o3 can't do advanced math (or at least definitely not at the level openai claimed.. it was a lie, it turns out openai funds the dataset that measures this - ouch). And the bigger problem is, going from "ai can do maths" to "invent cures" is about a 10-100 X jump. If it wasn't, don't we think the pharma companies would have solved this by hiring lots of "really smart math guys"? As anyone in biotech will tell you, the hard bit is not the first third of the drug discovery pipeline (where 99% of ai driven biotechs focus). It's the later parts where the rubber meets the road.. i.e. where your precious little molecule is out in the real world with real people where the incredible variability of real biological hosts makes most drugs fail spectacularly. You can't GPT your way out of this. The answers for this is not in science papers that you can just read and regurgitate a version that "solves biology and cures diseases". To solve this you need AI but most of all you have to do science. Real science. In the lab, in vitro and in Vivo, not just in silico, doing ablation studies, overfitting famous benchmark datasets and other pseudo science shit the ML community is used to doing. That is all to say, I'd bet we won't see a single purely AI designed novel drug in the clinic in this decade. All parts of that sentence are important. Purely AI designed. Novel. But that's for another post.. Now, back to Altman. If you watch the clip, he almost did the smart thing at first when Trump put him on the spot and said "I have no idea about healthcare, biotech (or AI beyond board room drama)" but then could not resist coming up with this outlandish insane answer. Famously (in tech circles anyway) Paul Graham wrote more than a decade ago about Altman that he's the most strong willed individual he's ever met, who can just bend the universe to his will. That's his super skill. And clearly.. convincing SoftBank and Oracle to do this 500 billion investment for OpenAI (a non profit turned for profit) is an unbelievable achievement. I have no idea what Altman can say (or do) in board rooms that unlocks these possibilities for him.. Any ideas? Let me know!
- ensocode 2y agoWhy now? Is this to compensate the campaign donors or to scare Putin?
- lachlanj 2y agoIs there any government investment or involvement in this company? It seems like it’s all private investment so I’m confused why this is being announce by the President.
- netfortius 2y agoThey had me at "Oracle" ...
- ravish0007 2y agoAI surveillance on large scale
- Deutschland314 2y agoWhy oracle? Oracle wtf.
- brianbest101 2y ago[dead]
- realaleris149 2y agoIn America! The intro paragraph in the original URL https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/ mentions US/America for 5 times!
- DrScientist 2y agoIf I understand correctly - if you are training a model to perform a particular task - in the end what matters is the training data - and by and large different models will largely converge on the best representation of that data for the given task, given enough compute. So that means the models themselves aren't really IP - they are inevitable outputs from optimising using the input data for a certain task. I think this means pretty much everyone, apart from the AI companies - will see these models as pre-competitive. Why spend huge amounts training the same model multiple times, when you can collaborate? Note it only takes one person/company/country to release an open source model for a particular task to nuke the business model of those companies that have a business model of hoarding them.
- victor106 2y ago> All three credited Trump for helping to make the project possible, even though building has already started and the project goes back to 2024. It’s sad to see the president of US being ass kissed so much by these guys. I always assumed there’s a little of that but this is another extreme. If this is true, I fear America has become like a third world country with a dictator like head of state where everyone just praises him and get favors in return.
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- x-007 2y agomoney smells good i think
- demizer 2y agoHopefully they discover AGI and the AGI turns out to be a communist. They will kill it SO fast.
- seydor 2y agounless they have internally built models that are of much higher intelligence than what we have today, this seems like premature optimization
- biimugan 2y agoI really don't understand the national security argument. If you really do fear some fundamental breakthrough in AI from China, what's cheaper, $500 billion to rush to get there first, or spending a few billion (and likely much less) in basic research in physics, materials science, and electronics, mixed with a little bit of espionage, mixed with improving the electric grid and eliminating (or greatly reducing) fossil fuels? Ultimately, the breakthrough in AI is going to either come from eliminating bottlenecks in computing such that we can simulate many more neurons much more cheaply (in other words, 2025-level technology scaled up is not going to really be necessary or sufficient), or some fundamental research discovery such as a new transformer paradigm. In any case, it feels like these are theoretical discoveries that, whoever makes them first, the other "side" can trivially steal or absorb the information.
- tim333 2y agoI'm not sure I buy the national security argument but as you say the other side can trivially steal or absorb theoretical discoveries but not trivially get $500bn worth of data centers.
- biimugan 2y agoRight, but $500 billion in data centers alone is not likely to get you very far in the grand scheme of things. Endlessly scaling up today's technology eventually hits some kind of limit. And if you spend that money to discover some theoretical breakthrough that no longer requires the $500 billion outlay, then like I said, China will trivially be able to steal that breakthrough and spend much less than $500 billion to reproduce it. Is "getting there first" going to actually be worth it? That's what I'm questioning.
- msoad 2y agono... one more lane will fix the traffic. Truly American approach Amazing to see how DeepSeek R1 is doing better than OpenAI models with much less resources
- maxglute 2y ago500B of compute infrastructure with order of magnitude greater deprecation / need to return on capital. Compute isn't concrete infra with 50+ years of value, more like 5 years, i.e. need to produce 50-100B worth value per year to break even. On top of the “$125B hole that needs to be filled for each year of CapEx at today’s levels” according to Sequoia. All which with could be wiped by PRC pacing SOTA model, unless 500B of more compute will lead to qualititive model differences. Right now, I don't know where that value is coming from, so either a lot of investors are getting fleeced, or this is a Manhattan tier strategic project... privately funded, which makes even less strategic sense.
- dpflan 2y agoLast time, in 2016, SoftBank announced a $50B investment in the US...what were the results of that? Granted, SB announced an up-selled $100B investment earlier, is this not similar in "announcement"? """ SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son has previously made large-scale investment commitments in the US off the back of Trump winning a presidential election. In 2016, Son announced a $50 billion SoftBank investment in the US, alongside a similar pledge to create 50,000 jobs in the country. ... However, as reported by Reuters, it’s unclear if the new jobs pledged back in 2016 ever came to fruition and questions have been raised about how SoftBank, which had $29 billion in cash on its balance sheet according to its September earnings report, might fund the investment. """ - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-100bn-investment-in-us-during-trumps-presidency/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/softbank-pledges-...
- 1970-01-01 2y agoCan't wait for these to succeed just in time for them to tell us 'you should have spent all this time and money fighting climate change'
- smeeger 2y agoartificial intelligence must be stopped
- w00ps 2y agoO1 Pro's opinion on Stargate: Humans are hallucinating, again... https://justpaste.it/631gx https://justpaste.it/631gx
- stronglikedan 2y agoI hope they build those little nuclear reactors into these datacenters.
- jnsaff2 2y agoI miss n gate so much. I asked AI to generate one for this thread. "In a stunning display of fiscal restraint, Sam Altman only asks for $500 billion instead of his previous $7 trillion moonshot. Hackernews rejoices that the money will be spent in Texas, where the power grid is as stable as a cryptocurrency exchange. Oracle's involvement prompts lengthy discussions about whether Larry Ellison's surveillance dystopia will run on Java or if they'll need to purchase an enterprise license for consciousness itself. Meanwhile, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son continues his streak of funding increasingly expensive ways to turn electricity into promises, this time with added patriotism. The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd."
- causal 2y agoOkay that's hilarious.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago> The comments section devolves into a heated debate about whether this is technically fascism or just regular old corporatocracy, with several users helpfully pointing out that actually, the real problem is systemd. I use arch, btw.
- nojvek 2y ago> create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. 100s of 1000s of jobs seems a bit exaggerated.
- rchaud 2y agoThe US appears to be fully in the grips of centralized economic autarky. A tiny coterie of industrialists who have the President's ear decide how to allocate a gigantic amount of capital for their pet projects while the state raises tariffs and implements bans to protect them from competition. Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
- jeffy29 2y agoAnd it never is.
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- whimsicalism 2y agothis is private capital. yes, we are in an era of big projects and big capital deployment. is that synonymous with centralized autarky? i don’t agree
- i_love_retros 2y agoWhat does it have to do with Trump then? Why was he involved?
- umeshunni 2y agoHe love the publicity and most people won't realize that he doesn't have anything to do with this.
- aylmao 2y agoAI very much has to do with the state. It's an arms race between China and the USA, per many [4]. And China doesn't seem to be behind any longer [1]. It's not only Trump. Before leaving Biden already ordered the DoE and the DoD to lease sites for data centers and energy generation. The only reason we don't see a "Department of AI" or a "National AI Agency" is due to how the military industrial complex works, and a lot of lobbying I'm sure. [1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beijing-meeting-puts-spotlight-chinas-new-face-ai-deepseek-founder-liang-wenfeng https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beijing-mee... [2] https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/01/20/biden-administration-releases-executive-order-on-ai-infrastructure/ https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/01/20/biden-administra... [3] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-doe-dod-lease-sites-ai-data-centers-clean-energy/737257/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-doe-dod-lease-sites-a... [4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110269/there-can-be-no-winners-in-a-us-china-ai-arms-race/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110269/there-ca...
- class3shock 2y agoWell it just got alot harder to check and see if/when a new Stargate tv show or movie might be coming.
- lagrange77 2y agoI hate having to rely on these drip-feed vague statements to gauge the fate of the planet.
- 65 2y agoCan someone convince me Sam Altman is not evil? I have no proof he is not evil.
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- PeakKS 2y agoThey are clearly building GW from MGS2
- seattle_spring 2y agoWhy are we spending a half-trillion dollars on “AI infrastructure” when our actual infrastructure has been crumbling and underfunded for decades?
- Rebuff5007 2y agoTangential, but this has gotten me thinking... I used to wonder how the hundreds of thousands of employees that work in Big Oil or Big Pharma could tolerate all the terrible things their company does... e.g. the opioid epidemic. The naive optimist in me never thought that the tech industry would ever be that bad. Now, as someone thats been in the industry for 10+ years and working adjacent to LLMs, this is all so depressing. The hype has gotten out of control. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on things that simply are not making life better for the majority of people.
- pms 2y agoThank you for being the voice of reason.
- renjimen 2y agoDitto. My non-tech friends ask what benefit AI has to society and I struggle to give them concrete examples that outweigh the opportunity cost of this kind of investment in more meaningful endeavors. Let alone the downsides of an algorithmically-driven society and the increasing environmental costs of AI workloads.
- whiplash451 2y agoOne of the key questions becomes: is this it for Europe?
- awei 2y agoHow much exaFLOPS can we expect from a 100 Billions dollars datacenter today? A rough estimate from a quick Perplexity search gives us 24 exaFLOPS for all smartphones in the world and 12 exaFLOPS for personal computers. Could a competitor to such a Datacenter be a collective effort with some sort of crypto to split the benefits?
- awei 2y agoapparently around 100 exaflops if the 100 billions dollars datacenter is made only of nvidia H100. I am guessing the fact that (most?) personal computers and smartphones do not have a big gpu makes the above scenario difficult.
- zhengiszen 2y agoSad waste of money that will go in Oracle licenses... The lost liberties of the American people is just a small feat... beside the point
- rickley21 2y ago[dead]
- jl2718 2y ago1. At this scale, we’re not just talking about buying GPUs. It requires semiconductor fabs, assembly factories, power plants, batteries/lithium, cooling, water, hazardous waste disposal. These data centers are going to have to be massively geo-engineered arcologies. 2. What are they doing? AGI/ASI is a neat trick, but then what? I’m not asking because I don’t think there is an answer; I’m asking because I want the REAL answer. Larry Ellison was talking about RNA cancer vaccines. Well, I was the one that made the neural network model for the company with the US patent on this technique, and that pitch makes little sense. As the problem is understood today, the computational problems are 99% solved with laptop-class hardware. There are some remaining problems that are not solved by neural networks, but by molecular dynamics, which are done in FP64. Even if FP8 neural structure approximation speeds it up 100x, FP64 will be 99% of the computation. So what we today call “AI infrastructure” is not appropriate for the task they talk about. What is it appropriate for? Well, I know that Sam is a bit uncreative, so I assume he’s just going to keep following the “HER” timeline and make a massive playground for LLMs to talk to each other and leave humanity behind. I don’t think that is necessarily unworthy of our Apollo-scale commitment, but there are serious questions about the honest of the project, and what we should demand for transparency. We’re obviously headed toward a symbiotic merger where LLMs and GenAI are completely in control of our understanding of the world. There is a difference between watching a high-production movie for two hours, and then going back to reality, versus a never-ending stream of false sensory information engineered individually to specifically control your behavior. The only question is whether we will be able to see behind the curtain of the great Oz. That’s what I mean by transparency. Not financial or organizational, but actual code, data, model, and prompt transparency. Is this a fundamental right worth fighting for?
- almiron10 2y agoHow does a person with experience in digital marketing, graphic design, and lots of AI (text/image) usage get a small piece of this money?
- noirchen 2y agoAI is good if you use it wisely. There were reports years ago about using AI in SoCal to detect wild fires, but in the end we see insurance companies using AI to withdraw from areas of high fire risk. Quite competent AI, isn't it?
- eichi 2y agoElison is a only self-made man I prefer
- looseyesterday 2y agoDidn't anyone involved in naming this 'Stargate' ever actually watch the series? Not a good name if you're trying to create AGI
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- nbzso 2y agoHow is my memecoin going? Several billions, sir. Hahahahahaha
- bgnn 2y agoThis here reminds me a bubble in the making. Like South Sea Bubble to be precise.
- btbuildem 2y agoAm I wrong to conclude they just got rocked super hard by DeepSeek R1?