The Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas is nothing short of historic. Announced in early 2025 by a joint venture of OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, the project aims to invest up to $500 billion in U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure and was touted to create over 100,000 jobs nationwide.
Abilene – a city of about 130,000 residents – was chosen as the first location for this massive initiative, immediately placing the West Texas town on the tech industry map.
In Abilene, the venture’s first campus (often called Stargate I) is already under construction on a 1,000-acre tract known as the Lancium Clean Campus. The initial phase includes ten sprawling data center buildings, each around 500,000 square feet in size – truly gigantic facilities designed to house advanced AI supercomputing hardware.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison has noted that these first ten buildings are only the beginning, with plans to expand to 20 buildings and additional sites beyond Abilene in later phases. In terms of capacity, the Abilene data center campus is expected to draw an almost unprecedented amount of power: roughly 1.2 gigawatts (1,200 MW) at full scale, which necessitates building an on-site natural gas power plant for reliable electricity supply. For perspective, that is power on the order of a large electric generation station dedicated just to this AI facility.