Unpacking StarGate AI $500 Billion MegaProject
What It Really Is, And What It Hopes To Be
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Open AI CEO Sam Altman join our favorite Japanese Softbank Banker, Masa Masa Masayoshi, to announce a $500 Billion AI deal for US investment with Donald Trump, beginning with infrastructure in Texas with $100 Billion in immediate investment.
The press conference started well enough, with jobs for Americans, investment in Texas, national security, and leadership in AI. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took to the podium. And Ellison dove into a pitch for personalized mRNA cancer vaccines developed by AI. The StarGate Starship news conference could be seen having an “unscheduled rapid disassembly’ event in a rainbow of colors streaking across the sky.
The press conference ended with one of those “elephant in the room” moments: Larry Ellison pitched AI for personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer.
Ellison’s float of the “personalized mRNA cancer vaccine by AI” was pilloried by the cognoscenti on X/Twitter.
The “elephant in the room” was everyone’s collective thought bubble: “You mean for the cancers caused by mRNA?”. Still, the CEOs plunged ahead, thinly veiling a decade-long Cancer Genome Atlas project as a new investment in AI infrastructure.
The devil is always in the deals for these mega announcements, but I will try to unpack fact from fiction with what we know so far.
My initial reaction is that Larry Ellison is repacking the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX’s commitment to building AI GPU-based infrastructure, which was recently announced in Davos 2025.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/20/abu-dhabi-330-billion-wealth-fund-warns-on-ai-disruption.html
The initial AI data centers for the StarGate MegaProject will be in Abilene, Texas, and Larry Ellison insists the construction has already started (perhaps a few shovelfuls of dirt were turned before his jet flew to Washington, DC, for the Stargate press release).
The chip technology appears to be ARM’s new GPU chip designed in partnership with Nvidia, but ARM has many shipped GPU’s for mobile devices and doesn’t currently have a server configuration.
However, I do believe a semi-stealth project was going on at Oak Ridge National Lab in 2022 to come up with an ARM GPU server configuration, and that project seems to be more public now. The Oak Ridge project may be the “secret sauce” that Larry Ellison is bringing to the StarGate deal. This doesn’t mean that Grok and Anthropic will be shut out of the new ARM-Nvidia GPU supercomputing technology since both organizations are large customers of Nvidia.
