Billionaire Elon Musk, who is seen as US president Donald Trump’s right-hand man, has openly criticised the new US administration’s Stargate AI project, which is being driven by OpenAI and Softbank.
Trump unveiled the Stargate Project as part of a roll of measures to kickstart his presidency with support from tech giants. The project is run as a new company which intends to invest $500bn over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US.
Musk has previously been highly critical of OpenAI, a company he co-founded with the current CEO, Sam Altman, in 2015. The pair fell out over OpenAI’s decision to operate as a non-profit entity.
In March 2023, Musk launched a rival called xAI. In this latest post on X (formerly Twitter), he wrote: “They don’t have any money.” This has raised questions among his followers as to why the man who made significant donations to support the Republican party’s campaign to win the US elections in November is not supporting the initiative.
In spite of Musk’s initial comment, it appears that there is plenty of funding behind the Trump administration’s plans to develop sovereign AI capabilities based on OpenAI. SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX are putting up the initial funding for the project. The technology firms supporting the project are Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI.
The work on the first AI Stargate Project datacentre begins with a $100bn datacentre facility in Texas. Trump’s goal is to demonstrate US AI leadership, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of American jobs and generate economic benefit. The project is also being positioned to support the “re-industrialisation of the United States” and provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
Microsoft, which has plunged billions into supporting OpenAI, said collaboration on the Stargate Project builds on its existing OpenAI partnership. “OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional compute to train leading models and deliver great products and services,” it posted in a blog.
OpenAI has now partnered with Microsoft rival Oracle and is set to work alongside Nvidia on building and operating the new Stargate Project computing system.
According to analyst firm Constellation Research, the most significant part of the Stargate Project announcement is changes to the existing exclusivity agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft has a right of first refusal and has approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models. What this means, according to Constellation Research, is OpenAI will be using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as Microsoft Azure.
In what appear as a preemptive move to avoid criticism that Stargate Project may waterdown its existing OpenAI partnership, on which it has built an entire AI business, Microsoft said: “The key elements of our partnership remain in place for the duration of our contract through 2030, with our access to OpenAI’s intellectual property, our revenue sharing arrangements and our exclusivity on OpenAI’s APIs all continuing forward.”
Specifically, it said that the company will continue to have rights to OpenAI IP, inclusive of model and infrastructure, for use within our products such as Copilot. Moreover, the OpenAI application programming interface (API) will remain solely an Azure feature, which runs on Azure and is available through the Azure OpenAI Service.
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