What OpenAI’s Stargate Issues Could Teach Anthropic

Over the past year, the running joke in the data center industry—even inside OpenAI—has been that the $500 billion Stargate initiative was less of a master plan than a “vibe.”

My reporting this weekend showed how little Stargate resembles the $500 billion effort touted at a White House event just over a year ago. Stargate now has no staff, nor does it have any obvious role in data center development. It has ended up as a flexible umbrella for OpenAI’s compute partnerships. Longtime readers may remember that in March 2024, we reported that “Stargate” then referred to OpenAI’s plan to build a $100 billion supercomputer with Microsoft.