Oracle Corporation (ORCL.US) abandons its plans to expand data centers in Texas, OpenAI or Meta (META.US) may take over the project.

According to media reports, Oracle Corporation (ORCL.US) and OpenAI have abandoned their plans to expand a flagship artificial intelligence (AI) data center in Texas, USA. Sources familiar with the matter said that due to prolonged financing negotiations and changing demands from OpenAI, the project was ultimately shelved. The project was part of the "Stargate" program, a joint project involving SoftBank Group, OpenAI, and Oracle with a total investment of up to $500 billion and a total capacity of 10 gigawatts, announced by President Trump in January 2025. This adjustment highlights the complexity of constructing AI data centers. Such projects typically involve investments of hundreds of billions of dollars and require coordination and support from multiple partners. Last September, the companies announced plans to further expand the data center capacity in Abilene, Texas near the existing Stargate core campus by up to 600 megawatts. However, a source familiar with the situation said on Friday that the additional computing capacity originally planned will now be taken up by other data center campuses currently under construction. Currently, the data center campus in Abilene has 8 buildings operated by Oracle Corporation's cloud infrastructure division, with two buildings already operational. The source added that the overall plan to build an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity with OpenAI and Oracle Corporation is still ongoing. In recent years, major tech companies have been investing billions of dollars in data centers to support services like ChatGPT and Copilot, which require massive computing resources. Meanwhile, the breakdown in negotiations between Oracle Corporation and OpenAI has created an opportunity for Meta (META.US). Meta is reportedly considering leasing a data center expansion project in Abilene, Texas from developer Crusoe, with assistance from NVIDIA Corporation. Crusoe's data center in Abilene is one of the most anticipated projects. Oracle Corporation is quickly deploying servers in the campus buildings, which OpenAI uses for training and running its AI products. Currently, Oracle Corporation and OpenAI are using NVIDIA Corporation's AI chips in the Stargate project. Reports suggest that NVIDIA Corporation is involved in negotiations to ensure that the expanded data center continues to use its chip products instead of competitors like AMD. In response to the reports, Sachin Katti, Head of Infrastructure at OpenAI, stated on social media, "Our flagship Stargate campus is one of the largest AI data center campuses in the United States. We did consider further expansion, but ultimately decided to deploy the additional computing power elsewhere." This article is sourced from Funds Society, GMTEight edited by: Lifo.