Mixed views on Stargate AI infrastructure plan with OpenAI

Advancing U.S.’ lead in AI

Stargate addresses what tech vendors and the administration see as a critical need to establish and maintain the U.S as the leader in AI technology.

"It reflects a public-private partnership to accelerate AI development," said Lydia Clougherty Jones, an analyst with Gartner. "The missing piece is the energy that's needed to develop AI at the higher levels, which is desired by the administration.”

The project’s funding will go towards building data centers and energy infrastructure so the U.S. can maintain its global leadership status while overcoming the huge energy demands of developing and using  AI and generative AI technology, she added.

Energy demand is a big problem as AI technology continues to expand and grow, said Mel Morris, CEO of Corpora.ai, developer of an AI research engine.

"The elephant in the room on this one is power generation, and therefore, we have to start to consider how we're going to actually provide the levels of electrical power these things are going to need in order to fuel that development," Morris said.

Trump is not the only president who has seen AI infrastructure and energy consumption as a critical challenge.

Former president Joe Biden on Jan. 14 signed an executive order to provide support for the massive need for fast-growing AI data centers.

"Both administrations have had the ambitions to develop these data centers with the requisite energy infrastructure in the United States," Clougherty Jones said.

Positive and negative reactions

The new project has received mixed reactions, including unexpected criticism from xAI CEO Elon Musk, a key backer of President Trump.

In response to OpenAI's post about Stargate on X, Musk wrote: "They don't actually have the money. 

While Altman first responded to Musk by calling him "the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time," he later followed up by asking Musk “to put the USA first” in his new role, apparently referring to Musk’s post heading up the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Musk was among others in critiquing the new venture.

The civic advocacy group Public Citizen, and others, raised alarm about the harmful environmental effects of data centers powered largely by electricity.

Tyler Saltsman, a former U.S. Army officer and founder of generative AI startup EdgeRunner AI, said he sees Stargate as an opportunity for the U.S. However, he questioned OpenAI's lead role and motive.

"It's a great signal that the administration is prioritizing investments for AI for the U.S," Saltsman said.

But he argued that the biases in OpenAI's training data are not clear, which is problematic and a threat to national security.

"We need to understand that training data, where they're getting the training data and what it looks like because if we don't it becomes a black box,” Saltsman continued.

Meanwhile, OpenAI's recent internal changes are also a cause for concern, said Davi Ottenheimer, vice president of trust and digital ethics at private data storage firm Inrupt. Ottenheimer was referring to most of OpenAI's founding board members having left the company.

 "I wouldn't look to OpenAI for innovation," Ottenheimer said. "I saw a big shift in the board, and I think that was a pretty clear warning sign that there's something rotten in OpenAI."

Ottenheimer also questioned the first location for the project.

"It's for AI in Texas, so that doesn't sound right. This looks like a lot of moving money around and looking like we're doing something,,” he said.

Government regulation of Stargate is critical to ensure that what the project’s creators will deliver what they have promised, he continued.

Moreover, there are numerous moving parts to the project, including the different alliances involved, said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data science and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago.

"This is a complicated mix of political, geopolitical and financial relationships that could make this a complicated project going forward," Bennett said.  By geopolitical, Bennett referred to the global competition between the US, China, and other technologically advanced nations to exploit AI.

Whether Stargate fulfills its promise will be seen in four years. In the meantime, the project itself might face some challenges depending on how it's rolled out in other states. "We have to imagine the communities in which these new centers are proposed will at least in some instances have something to say about the energy requirements and the proposed solution to providing energy," Bennett said.

Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.