(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump is expected to announce a new investment push for artificial intelligence led by Softbank Group Corp., OpenAI LLC, and Oracle Corp., with the three companies preparing to announce a joint venture worth billions of dollars.
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Trump will be joined by Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison to announce an initial $100 billion investment — which could scale up to $500 billion over the next four years — on Tuesday afternoon, according to a White House official.
The announcement was first reported by CBS News. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It’s not clear if the initiative, which the companies are dubbing “Stargate,” is in addition to or part of the $100 billion that Son pledged SoftBank alone would invest during an event with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate last month.
At the time, Son said the Softbank effort would create 100,000 jobs focused on artificial intelligence and related infrastructure, including investments in data centers, semiconductors and energy.
“I would really like to celebrate the great victory of President Trump and my confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory,” Son said at the time.
Despite the public pledge, there were immediate questions over where SoftBank would get the capital to fund its initiative. The company had 3.8 trillion yen ($25 billion) in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet at the end of September. Still, the company’s finances have recovered with the initial public offering of chip design firm Arm Holdings Plc.
Earlier this month, Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani promised his company, DAMAC, would invest $20 billion in US data centers.
Trump has cozied up to Silicon Valley executives since winning a second term, with prominent executives including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai joining him at the US Capitol on Monday for his inauguration.
Cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., and Oracle have been racing to expand computing capacity by constructing new data centers. Oracle has already committed billions to build out new data centers — the company is expected to double its capital expenditures this fiscal year to over $14 billion, in large part due to these projects.
