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SoftBank and Open AI's $500 Billion AI Project Struggles To Get Off Ground (msn.com)

(Monday July 21, 2025 @11:30PM (msmash) from the reality-check dept.)


The [1]$500 billion Stargate AI project announced by SoftBank and OpenAI at the White House six months ago has [2]failed to complete a single data center deal and sharply scaled back its near-term plans. The venture, which originally pledged to invest $100 billion "immediately," now aims to build one small data center by year-end, likely in Ohio, according to WSJ. SoftBank and OpenAI have disagreed over crucial partnership terms, including site locations.

OpenAI has proceeded independently, signing a deal with Oracle worth more than $30 billion annually starting within three years. That agreement totals 4.5 gigawatts of capacity and would consume power equivalent to more than two Hoover Dams. Combined with a smaller CoreWeave deal, OpenAI has secured nearly as much data center capacity as Stargate promised for this year. SoftBank invested $30 billion in OpenAI earlier this year as part of the infrastructure partnership plans.



[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/01/21/225229/trump-to-announce-up-to-500-billion-in-ai-infrastructure-investment

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/softbank-and-open-ai-s-500-billion-ai-project-struggles-to-get-off-ground/ar-AA1J1cYy


Oh dear (Score:1)

by JimBowen ( 885772 )

What a shame

Never mind

Is it just me (Score:3)

by gweihir ( 88907 )

Or do the "AI Failure" stories get more frequent? Well, that is how it goes until a critical mass is reached. And then the house of cards collapses and we get to see how little LLMs can actually do when they need to compete on merit instead on hype.

Kind of boring when you see this happening for the 3rd time or so.

Re: (Score:2)

by high_rolla ( 1068540 )

I'm suspecting this is where we are headed but we don't have the shiny new technology fad to move onto yet. (I'm just waiting for someone to mash up AI and blockchain, imagine how much hype you could muster up over that)

A bunch of rural communities (Score:2)

by rsilvergun ( 571051 )

Have these data centers dropped into their area and now they have water shortages. Like there are times you turn on your tab and no water comes out.

I mean sure the data center could recycle that water but that costs money.

They're also incredibly noisy. Like if you live year one there is this constant horrible droning going on.

And of course you're competing for electricity so your power bill goes up. Unlike water so far it's kept up and I'd haven't heard of anyone's lights being shut off but the

Re: (Score:2)

by Morromist ( 1207276 )

The rich didn't have consumers to worry about during most of human history - like consider the middle ages. The rich owned the land and the people payed them for the privilege of farming it. A special class of artisans served the rich and didn't do much with the peasants. The peasants only existed to labor on the land for the benefit of the rich because farming used to be a lot of work.

Sometimes there wasn't enough food and the peasants rose up to overthrow the rich. How many times did they succeed? 0.

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