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Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

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Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

#112

> starting in Texas Maybe I just don't get it. Texas seems like an awful place to do business.

My 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?

Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

#113
post #49
post #16

Any clues to how they plan to invest $500 billion dollars? What infrastructure are they planning that will cost that much?

That 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.

He wanted to do that, but would have needed 5T for that. Only got 100 bn so far, so this is what you get (only slightly /s)

Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

#114
post #54

> 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…

SoftBank having financial responsibility is insane. This is just a way to funnel money into people Trump owes.

I don't get it, if this was government/American funded I could understand the marketing as "USA" secured infrastructure but like it's not?

Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

#117

Data centers are overrated, local AI is what’s necessary for humanoid (and other) robots, which will be the most economically impactful use case.

You 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.

Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

#118
post #33

It 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.

I 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.

Re: Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers

#120

"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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