(Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp., OpenAI and Oracle Corp. are forming a $100 billion joint venture to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure, an effort unveiled with President Donald Trump aimed at accelerating development of the emerging technology .
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“We are beginning a tremendous investment that is coming to our country at levels that no one has seen before,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.
The president was joined by SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. The joint venture will deploy $100 billion “immediately” and aims to grow to “at least” $500 billion in AI projects, including data centers and physical campuses, Son said. Companies such as Microsoft Corp. and chipmaker Nvidia Corp. are also expected to participate.
Trump has signaled a wide-ranging approach to ensuring US leadership in AI, with promises to spur private sector investment by speeding up the permitting process and easing other regulations. Those efforts will be led by tech industry leaders who have joined his administration, including incoming AI cryptocurrency czar David Sacks and Elon Musk, who has become one of the president’s closest advisers.
The president said he would use emergency declarations and executive actions to help facilitate construction projects, including through easier access to energy. During his remarks, Trump and the executives highlighted potential applications of AI in healthcare and other fields that would boost U.S. economic growth.
“AI is incredibly promising for all of us, for all Americans,” Ellison said.
SoftBank shares rose to their highest level since September in Tokyo on Wednesday, joining rallies in Nvidia, Oracle and Arm Holdings Plc. More than 400 stocks in the S&P 500 rose in U.S. trading Tuesday, with the gauge up nearly 1%, on expectations that Trump would unveil the new AI investment push.
Still, the real scope of the new commitments remained unclear.
Son visited Mar-a-Lago just last month to announce that SoftBank would spend $100 billion during the next presidential term, and Tuesday’s announcement built on that effort, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ellison said some of the data centers considered for the project were already under construction, and OpenAI has also broadly outlined plans to invest in AI infrastructure.
Two weeks before taking office, Trump announced a $20 billion investment from Dubai-based billionaire Hussain Sajwani for new data centers across the United States. On Monday, shortly after being sworn in, he rescinded AI protection barriers imposed by Joe Biden and signed a series of measures to boost U.S. energy development to meet a surge in U.S. energy demand. data centers.
But skepticism remains about whether the initiative, dubbed “Stargate” by the companies, actually represents a dramatic increase over previous plans. Son’s announcement last month raised questions about where SoftBank would get the capital to finance its initiative. The company had 3.8 trillion yen ($25 billion) in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet at the end of September.
Since winning a second term, Trump has reached out to Silicon Valley, and prominent executives including Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai joined him at the US Capitol for his swearing-in ceremony on Monday.
OpenAI’s Altman has spent months trying to form a global coalition between government and industry leaders to support increasing the supply of chips, power and data center capacity to support AI development. The company also raised with the Biden administration the need for massive data centers that use as much energy as entire cities.
SoftBank previously invested in OpenAI’s most recent fundraising round. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told Bloomberg News last month that she was attracted to SoftBank because the company has “access to a lot of capital” and is prepared to invest that money, including “in areas like energy and data centers.” “.
In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, Ellison noted that Stargate has been in the works “for a long time.” Construction is already underway on the first such data centers in Texas, Ellison said, and they will be handed over to Altman (and presumably OpenAI) “to begin training their next model.”
“The scale of this investment is obviously enormous,” Altman said. “And what I think that says about the likely progress of technology, at least what we all believe, is equally enormous.”
Cloud infrastructure providers such as Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. and Oracle have been racing to expand computing capacity by building new data centers. Oracle has already committed billions to build new data centers; The company is expected to double its capital expenditures this fiscal year to more than $14 billion, largely due to these projects.
–With help from Jackie Davalos and Rachel Metz.
(Updates with more events starting in the fourth paragraph)
