$500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure project struggles to get off the drawing board
Backer SoftBank isn't fussed, is excited that Arm will provide half of new cloudy CPUs this year
The $500 billion Stargate project that aims to build a network of AI datacenters around the globe is off to a slow start, but its main backer – Japan’s SoftBank – isn’t worried.
CFO Yoshimitsu Goto mentioned delays during SoftBank’s Thursday announcement of its Q1 earnings, when he offered his personal view that the project is proceeding “slower than usual” due to difficulties finding sites for datacenters.
“There are a lot of options, and it's been taking time to select a good site,” he said. “And there are a lot of stakeholders. To build consensus, we need to have a lot of discussions and also technical issues and construction issues. There are a lot of things that we need to look at.”
Once Stargate’s members – among them Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI – settle on a physical design and agree how to fund builds, Goto thinks the project will proceed at pace.
“We want to deliberately spend time to build the first model successfully,” he said. “And also, we need to look at how you test the project to make it successful. So eventually -- or looking back, you may think that it was taking more than or longer than expected, but we don't have to worry about that.”
The CFO said he expects Stargate will meet its target of spending around $500 billion on datacenter builds within five years.
- Altman embraces inner Viking, raids Europe with 100K GPU supercluster in Norway
- OpenAI sweet-talks Oracle into another 4.5GW worth of Stargate datacenters, assuming the check clears
- Stargate to land its first offshore datacenters in the United Arab Emirates
- A big AI build has ‘stalled’ and won’t happen this year as funds and GPUs prove elusive
SoftBank owns UK-based chip designer Arm, which won $1.05 billion revenue for the quarter, up 12 percent year on year. Revenue from chip design licenses grew even faster, at 25 percent.
Goto predicted that half of all new server chips shipped to hyperscalers in 2025 will use its architecture. “The number of enterprises using Arm-based chips for cloud processing has grown more than 14x since 2021, exceeding 70,000 in 2025,” he added.
SoftBank posted a $2.9 billion profit, a somewhat unusual event for the company. Revenue rose seven percent to $12.4 billion. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
