Foreign media have discovered that Microsoft and OpenAI intend to launch in the next six years the Stargate data center project, which will be built on the basis of a $100 billion supercomputer “with millions of specialized server chips.” ” to support OpenAI AI. It will be the largest of those planned to be deployed (in total, the companies want to build about five such supercomputers in the United States as part of long-term cooperation).
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According to The Information portal, which cites two anonymous sources (one is close to Sam Altman, the other is familiar with Microsoft’s budget documentation), the financing will fall entirely on Microsoft. A pilot supercomputer for OpenAI should appear in 2026, and Stargate itself in 2028.
The title of the project, Stargate, refers to the science fiction film Stargate with Kurt Russell, where an interstellar portal became “the key to the past, the door to the future and the path to discovery,” as the trailer says. Apparently, OpenAI and Microsoft are pursuing the same goals, according to Gizmodo.
Presumably, such a large-scale and expensive project could occupy several hundred hectares of land and require up to 5 gigawatts of energy. But its implementation is directly related to OpenAI’s next big AI update: GPT-5, which is expected in early 2025.
In 2023, OpenAI failed to launch Arrakis, and it is feared that the same fate awaits GPT-5, and then the Stargate project also risks missing its deadlines.
The new information about Stargate has analysts recalling Sam Altman’s recent negotiations with investors in the United Arab Emirates to build a factory to produce artificial intelligence chips and avoid the need to use Nvidia solutions, which would significantly increase the cost of any AI project, especially one this big. one. Having our own factory would solve the problem and provide a significant competitive advantage.
Microsoft Corporation first invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, and in January 2023 announced long-term plans to regularly invest in the partner company (Bloomberg then wrote about $10 billion, although the companies themselves did not announce the amount).
Microsoft is making serious bets on the development of OpenAI; The tech giant’s Azure cloud service will continue to act as the exclusive provider for developer ChatGPT, and Microsoft intends to roll this product out to its Bing search engine and office applications.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
