OPENAI NEWS: Stargate. The $500 Billion Mirage

How a tenant became the architect of America’s AI future.

OpenAI has spent much of 2025 promoting what it calls The Stargate Project a vast new layer of “AI infrastructure” that, if taken at face value, would reshape America’s digital landscape. The company claims that Stargate will channel five hundred billion dollars into data centres, energy systems and supply chains over the next four years.

The tone of its announcements evokes an industrial renaissance. Sites in Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Ohio and, as of this week, Michigan. Thousands of jobs. Billions in capital. An America being re-industrialised by AI. USA USA USA

But OpenAI is not a builder. It owns no land. It holds no energy licences. It is a consumer of compute, not a producer of it. The Stargate story has been written to suggest ownership and agency where there is only tenancy.

What follows is a reconstruction of the facts, a map of who actually pays, builds and controls this infrastructure, and an explanation of why this matters for governance, power and the illusion of scale.

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Timeline of the Stargate Project

21 January 2025

OpenAI publishes Announcing the Stargate Project and declares that a new entity “intends to invest 500 billion dollars over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.” One hundred billion dollars, it says, will be deployed immediately. The statement provides no breakdown of ownership or financing.