(Bloomberg) — OpenAI and Oracle Corp. plan to begin filling a massive new data center in Texas with tens of thousands of powerful AI chips from Nvidia Corp. in the coming months, part of a push to get the first facility for their $100 billion Stargate infrastructure venture up and running.
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The site, in the small city of Abilene, is expected to house 64,000 of Nvidia’s coveted GB200 semiconductors by the end of 2026, according to a person familiar with the matter. The chips will be added to several halls of the data center in phases, with an initial rollout of 16,000 set to be completed by this summer, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.
The total planned shipments represent a massive amount of computing power for just the initial phases of one data center for a single customer. It also underscores the potential scale of the Stargate joint venture, which was unveiled by OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle at a White House event in January. OpenAI previously said Stargate will expand to as many as ten sites.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the startup is working together with Oracle on the design and delivery of the Abilene data center, and that Oracle is in charge of getting and operating the supercomputer that is being built there. Oracle did not respond to a request for comment. Nvidia declined to comment.
Stargate joins a race among leading tech companies to build up capacity of Nvidia’s newest chips, which are largely used to train and deploy generative AI models. Elon Musk’s xAI recently inked a $5 billion deal with Dell Technologies Inc. for AI servers for a supercomputer in Memphis. Meta Platforms Inc. has said it planned to have computing power equal to 600,000 Nvidia H100s — a previous generation of the company’s data center semiconductors — by the end of 2024. And CoreWeave Inc., an AI-focused cloud provider, has more than 250,000 Nvidia graphics processing units across 32 data centers, it said in paperwork for an public offering earlier this month.
The number of GB200s intended just for the first Stargate facility would cost billions of dollars. Though Nvidia hasn’t publicly announced a price for the GB200, Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said last year that its less powerful B200 chip costs between $30,000 and $40,000 apiece.
