President Donald Trump presented on Tuesday, January 21, a new investment project in artificial intelligence led by SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle. The three companies announced a joint venture worth billions of dollars, with an initial investment of $100 billion that could reach $500 billion in the next four years. The announcement was made in the company of Masayoshi Son from SoftBank, Sam Altman from OpenAI, and Larry Ellison from Oracle.
Oracle's shares rose around 6 percent after the news, but the companies have not commented on it so far. It is unclear whether this initiative, named Stargate, is part of the $100 billion that Son promised to invest during a meeting with Trump the previous month at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Donald Trump's interest in Silicon Valley has been notable since his re-election, with the presence of figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai at his inauguration. For his part, Altman from OpenAI has been working on creating an international coalition to promote the supply of chips, energy, and data center capacity that supports the development of artificial intelligence.
SoftBank had previously invested in OpenAI, and according to the company's CFO, Sarah Friar, it was attracted by SoftBank's willingness to invest in areas such as energy and data centers, given its access to significant capital. Shares of cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have been competing to expand computing capacity through the construction of new data centers.
Trump has also shown a marked interest in consolidating the leadership of the United States in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with a series of measures aimed at boosting the country's energy development to meet the growing energy demand of data centers. Oracle has already committed significant sums for the construction of new data centers in the country and recently lifted the AI protection barriers imposed by the previous administration.
