~$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.
Maybe they will invest in nuclear reactors.
Data center, AI and nuclear power stations. Three advanced technologies, that's pretty good.
I'm watching the announcement live from the white house and something about this just feels so strange and dystopian.
For 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.
sama, peter thiel ... they dgaf. there is a huge difference between an oppressed gay person and a wealthy one.
I 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.
Investigate the connection between Softbank and Apple; then examine the ties between Tim Cook and Trump: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4d75zl212o 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.
> Tim Cook
He changed his name to curry favor with prez. He’s Tim Apple now
> 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…
The fund is run out of the US. Parent co is in Japan
The 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.
> 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 unde…
Things can always change, but today China is significantly more dependent on petrochemicals than the US. I'm not sure what you're referring to with regards to agriculture, both the US and China have strong food industries that produce plenty of foods containing protein.
I generally agree that government sponsorship of this could be bad for competition. But Google in particular doesn't necessarily need outside investment to compete with this. They're vertically integrated in AI datacenters and they don't have to pay Nvidia.
Google definitely needs outside investment to spend $500b on capex.
Probably not popular opinion - but I actually think Google is winning this now. Deep research is the most useful AI product I have used (Claud is significantly more useful than openAI)
This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a later date. An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make one big…
Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.). Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without Trump. Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided yesterday. I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest explanation…
That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.