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White House and tech giants announce Stargate Project, a bold push ...

Jaws dropped across the Big Country Tuesday night when Abilene was mentioned at the White House as the home of the first data center in a $500 billion artificial intelligence initiative called the Stargate Project.

On his first full day in the White House, President Donald Trump introduced Oracle founder Larry Ellison, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a press conference to announce “the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.”

Stargate will be a new American company that Trump said would “almost immediately” create over 100,000 domestic jobs.

“It will ensure the future of technology. We want to keep it in this country,” Trump continued, mentioning China and others as leading competitors in the rapidly-expanding industry.

“I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations. They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them . . . to get that done, at their own plants if they want,” Trump said.

“Beginning immediately, Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” the president said. “This will include the construction of colossal data centers . . . and physical campuses currently being scouted nationwide.”

Trump said, “This is to me a very big thing, the $500 billion Stargate Project. I think it’s going to be something that’s very special. It could lead to something that could be the biggest of all.”

Trump then invited Ellison to the podium.

“AI holds incredible promise for all of us,” Ellison said, after thanking the president. “We’ve been working with OpenAI for awhile. The data centers are actually under construction, the first of them are under construction in Texas.

“Each building is half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”

Trump followed the tech moguls to finish up the press conference before moving on to other topics.

“This is money that would have normally gone to China or other countries. But at the end of my first full day in the White House, we’ve already secured nearly $3 trillion of investment in the United States,” he said, referencing other developments.

The Development Corporation of Abilene released a short statement Tuesday evening, stating, “This $500 billion initiative, with $100 billion deployed immediately, will establish critical AI infrastructure across the United States, starting in Abilene, Texas.”

DCOA touted how local leadership will turn the Key City into a key player in the future of AI innovation.

“AI seems to be very hot. It seems to be the thing that a lot of smart people are looking at very strongly” Trump said. “Our country will be prospering like never before. It’s going to be the Golden Age of America.”

Reporting in TechCrunch, an online publication covering the technology industry, stated that OpenAI was in negotiations to “lease an entire data center in Abilene, Texas — a data center that could could reach nearly a gigawatt of electricity by mid-2026. (A gigawatt is enough to power roughly 750,000 small homes.)”

Crusoe Energy was also mentioned as being involved in Stargate, reported TechCrunch, citing another tech industry publication called The Information.

The company made headlines this fall with their $3.4 billion investment on the Lancium Clean Campus under construction in north Abilene.

After the press conference, the three Tech Industry titans answered questions for reporters on Fox News.

“The first data centers are under construction in Texas already, and we’ll be turning them over to Sam (Altman) to start training their next (AI) model,” Ellison said. “The data center we already built; it was the largest computer ever built. The data center we’re building (now) will surpass it and will be the largest computer ever built, which enables this AI.”

Altman, earlier during the press conference, briefly mentioned how these new data centers will be the next step toward AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. While AI can perform some tasks, there is debate as to whether it is problem-solving or problem-resolving by using information already available to it.

Artificial General Intelligence by contrast completes the assigned task using human-like understanding, consciousness and the ability to generalize learning across all domains, independently. In essence, self-awareness or nearly adjacent to it.

In a Monday article in the magazine Fortune, Altman downplayed the release of AGI.

“We are not gonna deploy AGI next month, nor have we built it,” Altman told the magazine.

He said some ‘cool stuff’ was coming, but he “warned fans to cut their expectations by ‘100x.'” the magazine wrote.

Still, the story goes on to cite rumors of an AGI breakthrough behind closed doors and a “euphoria” among OpenAI followers on X who feverishly hype apparent advances in the current model as evidence . OpenAI staffers have taken to the social media platform to tamp down those expectations.

Outside the White House, Ellison put a fine point on the significance of the coming AI advances and by inference Abilene’s role in them and how they might affect the entire world.

“This is going to touch all of us. Yes, it takes a huge investment but the result will be vaccines that prevent cancers. Personalized medicine where we never run into a problem like COVID-19 before, because we’ll have an early warning,” he said. “We’ll know when (it) starts, when there are a handful of patients, rather than having to wait until it’s become an epidemic and very difficult to control.

“This is a very large investment that affects all of humanity.”

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