- OpenAI announces Utah one of 16 states that could host a massive new data center campus,
- Effort is part of initial phase of $500 billion, privately funded Stargate Project,
- Utah is already tracking as a rising "hot spot" for data center investments,
Artificial intelligence developer OpenAI on Thursday announced its list of 16 states, including Utah, that could potentially play host to nodes on a network of massive new data centers, the computing backbone for the privately funded $500 billion Stargate Project announced last month on President Donald Trump’s first full day in office.
At a Thursday press briefing, OpenAI offered some insight into initial efforts of the Stargate Project, detailing plans to build an interconnected system of five to 10 data center campuses, each roughly 1GW in scale that, combined, would support OpenAI’s “frontier AI models”, a step the company says is a core building block of its artificial intelligence platform.
While the first Stargate data center campus is already under construction near Abilene, Texas, Utah is on the list of future data center buildout sites “under active consideration” by OpenAI. Other states competing for the investments include Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia. OpenAI says additional site selections may be added later this year.
OpenAI has not disclosed cost estimates on the data center projects but industry data reflects current pricing of about $7 million to $12 million per megawatt of IT load, or about $7 billion to $12 billion for a 1GW facility.
OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane said emerging artificial intelligence tools represent a quantum advancement, on the scale of the advent of electricity, that will impact “how we live, how we work, how we engage with one another, even how we play.”
“(Artificial intelligence) is inherently a productive technology,” Lehane said “Think of it as a tool to help people solve incredibly hard problems, whether it’s in education, health care, sciences. These are ultimately tools to empower people to solve problems.”
Lehane also characterized the race to advance AI capabilities as a global competition that could tip the balance of influence, depending on who leads out on the innovation front.
“Up until relatively recently, there was a real sense that the U.S. had a material lead on the (Chinese Communist Party),” Lehane said. “It became clear last week when news emerged about (Chinese AI platform) DeepSeek ... that this is a very real competition and the stakes could not be bigger.
“Whoever ends up prevailing in this competition is going to really shape what the world looks like going forward, whether we have democratic AI that is free and open or an authoritarian AI that is autocratic.”
Who’s behind Stargate Project?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son gathered with Trump at a Jan. 22 White House press conference to announce the Stargate Project, a privately funded effort to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure, including massive data centers and new energy systems to drive that power-hungry technology, over the next four years.
Trump said the effort will create 100,000 new U.S. jobs on the way to building “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of AI.”
Stargate brings together some of the biggest global players in tech, including Oracle, which operates over 150 data centers around the world; Japan-based SoftBank, which manages the world’s largest technology-focused venture investment fund; and artificial intelligence software developer OpenAI, a leader in AI tools and the company behind natural language chatbot ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E.
In its own announcement last month, OpenAI noted MGX, a $100 billion investment arm of the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund is an equity partner in Stargate along with OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. Other partners include Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, along with advanced microchip makers Nvidia and Arm.
Stargate principals say they’ll make an initial $100 billion investment, currently underway with 10 data centers under construction near Abilene, Texas, and are “evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements” and plans to invest up to an additional $400 billion over the course of Trump’s second term.
During the press conference announcing Stargate, Ellison noted the Abilene data centers will be around 500,000 square feet per unit when complete. A data center of that scale can house thousands of servers and comes with a massive power requirement. Trump and Stargate principals noted that the planned infrastructure investments will include considerable outlays for new power generation sources.
A 2024 Goldman Sachs report details the computing necessities of AI far outstrip other digital processing and notes that, on average, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search. Goldman analysts said that at the time the report was issued, AI computational needs were consuming 1% to 2% of global power output but are on pace to increase by 160% by 2030.
Utah’s rank among data center hot spots on the rise
According to data from Baxtel, Utah currently has 47 data center facilities that occupy over 6.3 million square feet and consume nearly 600 megawatts of power. While the biggest single facility is the National Security Agency’s 1.5 million square-foot data center in Saratoga Springs, Facebook owner Meta is the biggest single operator with seven data centers in the state, per Baxtel data.
A report issued last November by Power Engineering notes Utah is poised to be one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the country and estimates near-term growth in the Salt Lake region of 699%, second only to Las Vegas/Reno, Nevada.
That growth estimate, according to the report, will be driven by “Utah’s ‘attractive’ tax incentives, affordable real estate and a growing tech presence.”