Openai Stargate Where The Us Sites Stand

Stargate, the $500 billion data center project involving OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, was showing active development at all seven of its US sites, but in this Epoch AI survey from spring 2026 only one was running: Abilene, Texas, at an estimated 0.3 gigawatts (epoch.ai). Elliot Stewart and Ben Cottier tracked each site through satellite images captured between February and April 2026 plus permits and company announcements. Together the sites add up to over 9 GW of planned capacity, which they compare to New York City's peak power demand and estimate could run the equivalent of 20 million Nvidia H100 GPUs, about the total AI compute in the world at the end of 2025. Capacity here means total facility power, including cooling and lighting, not just the chips. Epoch revised Abilene on April 23, 2026: it had estimated 0.6 GW operating, but an Oracle post implied only 200 megawatts, so it now expected 0.6 GW in late May and the full 1.2 GW in Q4 2026.

The other six sites were much earlier. Two Vantage campuses, a 2 GW site in Shackelford County, Texas, and a 1.3 GW site in Port Washington, Wisconsin, showed roofing on a first building and foundation work respectively. STACK Infrastructure's 2.2 GW Project Jupiter in New Mexico and Related Digital's 1.4 GW campus in Saline Township, Michigan, were at the foundation stage, while SoftBank's SB Energy had steel framing up in Milam County, Texas, with filings pointing to a first building delivered by October. All five carry a projected completion of Q4 2028. The seventh site, in Lordstown, Ohio, is mainly a SoftBank and Foxconn factory for servers and data center equipment; land had been cleared, but no large-scale data center construction was visible, and Epoch expects its capacity to stay under 0.3 GW.

The design choices show how builders are working around the bottlenecks of gigawatt-scale sites. At least three sites will run on-site natural gas plants to avoid waiting in long queues for a grid connection, and at least six will use closed-loop liquid cooling, which recirculates coolant instead of evaporating water. Epoch expects both choices to save time but raise costs. Oracle will own the hardware at most sites and SoftBank at Milam County and Lordstown, with all of them serving OpenAI's workloads.

The authors say the project has moved beyond ambition, with enough time left to finish by 2029, but list concrete risks. OpenAI dropped a planned expansion of Abilene to 2.1 GW and redirected that capacity elsewhere, and Microsoft has since partnered with Crusoe, the builder of the Abilene site, on an adjacent 900 MW campus. Lordstown has banned future data centers, the Michigan site faces local opposition, and Epoch expects financing and equipment procurement at this scale to be hard.