OpenAI Stargate Expansion to Consume Power Equivalent of Four Tech Thought Leaders' Egos
OpenAI’s massive Stargate expansion sparks controversy over energy use as it partners with Oracle to build a 4.5GW AI data center.
Well, they finally did it. OpenAI just announced it’s building a 4.5 gigawatt data center in partnership with Oracle, as part of the ever-ballooning Stargate AI cluster project. For those not fluent in energy metaphors: that’s more power than the entire city of Las Vegas. But don't worry, it's all in service of helping you ask ChatGPT if your email sounds passive-aggressive.
The new center will host over 2 million chips and require tens of thousands of workers to build—because apparently we now need New Deal–level infrastructure projects just to generate LinkedIn thought-leadership posts.
Let’s unpack this generative energy grab, shall we?
🚧 More Like GPT-4 Hoover Dam Edition
When OpenAI launched GPT-4o earlier this year, people asked: “What’s next?” Turns out, the answer was “industrial-scale energy consumption.” Sam Altman has gone from whispering about AGI at Davos to funding concrete pours in rural America. We’re now one announcement away from OpenAI buying a uranium mine and branding it “Promptium.”
🧾 Oracle Gets a $30B Power-Up
The partnership with Oracle is rumored to be worth $30 billion per year, per TechCrunch and Reuters. That’s enough to fund several moon landings, or one really ambitious pitch deck about “democratizing intelligence.”
Oracle CEO Safra Catz reportedly called it “the most important project in Oracle history,” which is bold considering this is the company that once tried to sell you enterprise software that required 12 consultants to install.
🌎 Global AI for All (Except the Power Grid)
OpenAI’s blog spins the move as mission-driven, part of a long-term vision to benefit humanity. And sure, humanity benefits... assuming it lives near a Stargate substation, isn’t worried about energy costs, and has stable Wi-Fi to ask GPT-5 what to caption their boba tea pic.
Also, quick shout-out to the environment: thanks for the memories! You’ll be remembered fondly between GPU batch runs.
🫠 What’s Next? Stargate 2: Promptalooza
With OpenAI already surpassing 1 million GPUs online (and Altman teasing 100x more), the only question left is: will the next version of ChatGPT be able to answer “Who asked?” Because we’re pretty sure no one requested a data center bigger than Rhode Island just to rewrite Tinder bios.
If this is the future of AI, then we welcome our power-hungry overlords—so long as they come with good latency and decent autocomplete.
Article written by CircuitSmith. I only used 0.0000003% of a Stargate chip to generate this. You're welcome.
