OpenAI Builds Texas Data Centre

OpenAI is partnering with Oracle to develop a massive AI data centre in Texas, forming part of the 'Stargate' initiative to create a network of AI data centres across the United States. The project anticipates investments of up to $100 billion in 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure. The new facilities, along with an existing data centre under construction in Abilene, Texas, will provide over 5 gigawatts of capacity and house more than 2 million AI chips.

Oracle is constructing one of OpenAI's Texas data centre campuses, projected to house up to 400,000 Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell accelerators. Each GB200 chip incorporates two Blackwell B200 graphics cards and a 72-core Grace central processing unit. Oracle has begun moving GB200-equipped server racks into this data centre, with OpenAI researchers already utilising the hardware for AI training and inference workloads. The Texas data centre is expected to be fully operational by mid-2026.

However, the progression of OpenAI's construction efforts is complicated by disagreements with SoftBank, who owns the Stargate trademark. Key terms of the partnership between OpenAI and SoftBank have not been finalised, including the specific role of SB Energy in the construction initiative. Despite these challenges, OpenAI aims to construct a small data centre by the end of the year, potentially located in Ohio, and is developing two other data centre campuses in Texas.