OpenAI shows off massive data center

In addition to Texas site, ChatGPT creator plans 5 more elsewhere

Associated Press

ABILENE, Texas — The afternoon sun was so hot that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traded his usual crewneck sweater for a T-shirt on the last legs of a visit last week to the massive Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex that will power the future of ChatGPT.

OpenAI announced Tuesday that its flagship AI data center in Texas will be joined by five others around the U.S. as the ChatGPT maker aims to make good on the $500 billion infrastructure investment promoted by President Donald Trump earlier this year.

Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, said it was building two more data center complexes in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio and another in a Midwest location it hasn’t yet disclosed.

But it’s the project in Abilene, Texas, that promised to be the biggest of them all, transforming what the city’s mayor called an old railroad town.

Oracle executives visiting the eight-building complex said it was already on track to be the world’s largest AI supercluster once fully built, a reference to its network of hundreds of thousands of AI computer chips that will be running in its H-shaped buildings.

Altman and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouyrk also sought to emphasize the steps they’ve taken to reduce the energy-hungry complex’s environmental effects on a drought-prone region of West Texas.

“We’re burning gas to run this data center,” said Altman, but added that “in the long trajectory of Stargate” the hope is to rely on many other power sources.

The complex will require about 900 megawatts of electricity to power the eight buildings.

One is already operating, and a second that Altman and Magouyrk visited Tuesday is nearly complete. Each server rack in those buildings holds 72 of Nvidia’s GB200 chips, which are designed for the most intensive AI workloads. Each building is expected to have about 60,000 of them.

MIXED FEELINGS

More than 6,000 workers now commute to the massive construction project each day, in what Mayor Weldon Hurt described as a significant boost to the local economy. The campus and nearby expansion will provide nearly 1,700 jobs onsite when fully operational, Oracle said, with “thousands more indirect jobs” predicted to be created.

But Hurt also acknowledged that residents have mixed feelings about the project because of its water and energy needs.

The city’s chronically stressed reservoirs were at roughly half-capacity this past week. Residents must follow a two-day-aweek outdoor watering schedule, trading off based on whether their address numbers are odd or even.

One million gallons of water from the city’s municipal water systems provides an “initial fill” for a closed-loop system that cools the data center’s computers and keeps the water from evaporating. After that initial fill, Oracle expects each of the eight buildings to need another 12,000 gallons per year, which it describes as a “remarkably low figure for a facility of this scale.”

“These data centers are designed to not use water,” Magouyrk said. “All of the data centers that we’re building (in) this part of Stargate are designed to not use water. The reason we do that is because it turns out that’s harmful for the environment and this is a better solution.”

POWERING THE SITE

The closed-loop system shows that the developer is “taking its impact on local public water supplies seriously,” but the overall environmental effect is more nuanced because such systems require more electricity, which also means higher indirect water usage through power generation, said Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied AI’s environmental toll.

Indeed, the data center complex includes a new gas-fired power plant, using natural gas turbines similar to those that power warships. Most of the power comes from the local grid.

Ren said that “even with emission-reduction measures, the health impacts of essentially turning the data center site into a power plant deserved further study for nearby communities.”

Arlene Mendler, a Stargate neighbor, said she wished she had more say in the project that eliminated a vast tract of mesquite shrubland.

“It has completely changed the way we were living,” said Mendler, who lives across the street. “We moved up here 33 years ago for the peace, quiet, tranquility.”