Stargate and the Abilene Project

OpenAI's New Push

150 miles west of Fort Worth there is a city of about 125,000 called Abilene, Texas. Founded in 1881 by the Texas and Pacific Railway as a shipping point for cattle, it earned the nickname "The Key City" of West Texas.

True to its name, Abilene may go on to become one of the key cities to America’s future, right up there with Memphis.

But what is Stargate? Who are the players?

Removing Barriers to American Leadership

The initiative, named Stargate, will:

• Begin with a $100B investment, with a goal of reaching $500B over four years.

• Focus on AI data centers and computing power, starting in Texas and expanding nationwide.

• Create over 100,000 jobs in AI-related industries.

On January 23, 2025, newly minted President Trump signed the executive order, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence”.

The EO outlines a strategic shift in U.S. AI policy, with the core goal of sustaining and enhancing America’s global AI dominance.

The order revokes previous AI policies put in place by the Biden administration, specifically Executive Order 14110, and mandates the development of a new action plan within 180 days.

Key actions include an immediate review and suspension or revision of conflicting policies enacted under the previous order, as well as the revision of OMB Memoranda M-24-10 and M-24-18 within 60 days to ensure budgetary and administrative alignment.

The order aims to clear a path for the United States to act decisively to retain global leadership in artificial intelligence. The definition of AI used in the order is the same as that in 15 U.S.C. 9401(3).

Key Takeaways

• AI companies are no longer required to report safety testing results for large-scale AI models.

• The role of the U.S. AI Safety Institute is uncertain. While it was not created by the Biden executive order, its regulatory function may be minimized.

• Federal AI guidance issued under Biden – including the AI Fact Sheet for Employers – is now in limbo, raising questions about existing agency policies and compliance measures.

• National security and economic competition now take center stage, as Trump’s administration frames AI as a geopolitical race against China with no appetite for a European-style level of regulation. With the new AI Czar, David Sacks, taking a pro-innovation, anti-regulation stance, U.S. AI policy is likely to prioritize competition over caution.

For me this is all good news. The doomers lost the cultural war when the future became just a little more grounded.

Rational people were confronted with the reality that p(doom) is little more than an arbitrary number, and it feel out of favor as a reliable metric, in part due to the lack of clarity about whether or not a given prediction is conditional on the existence of artificial general intelligence, the time frame, and the precise meaning of "doom".

Meanwhile, a China hiding its light under a bushel basket, is a very real and tangible threat.

The $500B Stargate Initiative

Stargate marks a significant shift in America’s AI development strategy and aims to secure the nation’s leadership in this critical field.

The initiative brings together key industry players:

OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, MGX, and Arm Holdings.

Left to right: President Trump, Masayoshi Son, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman

We’re all well aware of OpenAI and its shrewd operator CEO, Sam Altman (Sama).

Then you have Softbank, the Tokyo based multinational fund with hundred billion dollar wins under its belt like ARM and Alibaba, led by Masayoshi Son.

Next up, Oracle, the cloud and computer hyperscaler.

Microsoft, papa and partner to OpenAI.

NVIDIA, the GPU king and lord of the picks and shovels.

Arm Holdings, an early investment of SoftBank, which designs semiconductor and software solutions, now worth $111.5 billion.

And MGX, a leading AI and advanced technology investment company based in the United Arab Emirates, launched in March 2024 by the UAE's Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council.

And of course, the Trump Administration, which, as you read above, has already “removed” any “Barriers to American Leadership” that may stand in the way of AI development.

So what does this look like in practice?

Analysis

This deal is both an incredibly interesting and effective partnership.

You have OpenAI, currently the leading AI lab, partnering directly with the newly minted Trump administration. What makes this interesting is two fold:

1. Sama was a never Trumper.

2. Musk, Trump’s valued partner, is an active competitor with Sama and has a pending law suit against Open AI

And yet, when the chips were down, just like Zuck, he fell in line.

Why the change of heart?