Data-Center

For most of the AI conversation in 2024 and 2025, the binding constraints on the build-out were chips and capital. By 2026 the conversation has shifted, and the constraint that gets discussed most seriously inside the hyperscalers is electricity. Not the cost of electricity. The actual physical availability of electrons - at gigawatt scale, in the places where the data centres need to be, on the schedule the model labs need them to be. The story does not have a single villain or a single number, but it has a shape, and the shape is becoming the story of the second half of the decade. ...

TL;DR Stargate is a $500B AI infrastructure programme announced in January 2025 - the equity partners are OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi sovereign investor MGX Construction has already started in Texas with more sites planned, aimed at training and serving the next generation of frontier AI models The scale signals where compute spend is heading - tens of billions per cluster is becoming the price of admission at the frontier The initial $100B commitment is intended to scale to $500B by 2029, combining OpenAI’s models, SoftBank and MGX capital, and Oracle’s data-centre and infrastructure capabilities Worth tracking as a useful proxy for how seriously the industry takes the compute side of the AGI race About Stargate is a $500 billion AI infrastructure project announced in January 2025. The equity partners are OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, with Microsoft and Nvidia listed as technology partners rather than equity investors. ...