Stargate

Where the book uses it

• Chapter 1 — The Stakes

  What the race is for: the belief that a lead in AI can compound into a lasting advantage, how long such leads have actually lasted, and what a trillion dollars a year is being bet against.

Where the record uses it

• Campus Stargate Doña Ana / Project Jupiter
• Campus Stargate Shackelford / Frontier
• Campus Stargate UAE
• Campus Stargate Michigan / The Barn
• Campus Stargate Port Washington / Lighthouse
• Campus Stargate Milam County
• Campus Stargate Abilene
• Campus Stargate Norway
• Campus Stargate Lordstown
• Campus Stargate Korea (two sites)
• Campus Stargate UK
• Campus Stargate Argentina

And 2 more in the record.

Sources that use it

• Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI (Polity, October 2025; the US edition January 2026, the e-book December 2025; the three dates read on the UK and US pages of the publisher’s distributor, Wiley, on 30 September 2026, where the row gave January 2026 from the US page alone from 18 September 2026) (read directly in chapters 1 to 4 and then whole on 20 September 2026, with the author’s March 2026 book talks and his July 2025 and July 2026 podcast interviews; Srnicek dates the reprieve himself: “In May 2025, the global platforms and semiconductor exporters appear to have won at least a brief reprieve, as the Trump administration decided not to go ahead with the AI diffusion plan”, adding that “Plans remained afoot” to craft a rule meeting both goals and that the tensions were left intact; defence tech investment “has gone from around $2 billion in 2013 to nearly $35 billion in 2023”, the book’s note 135 citing PitchBook; chapter 1’s conclusion, on a bubble deflating: “The risks of a collapse in financial enthusiasm for AI are likely to be borne by pools of capital that are able to weather poor investment choices, whereas the dot-com boom involved many more retail investors unable to bear the shocks of a sudden drop in equity values”, the funding for AI companies “generally not coming from the stock market”; on the hardware’s shelf-life, in the same passage: “four years after the launch of Nvidia’s A100 chip, it remained the dominantly deployed chip in AI research, while the seven-year-old V100 chip remained the third most used chip”, the book’s note 87 citing Air Street Capital’s State of AI Report 2024, p. 94; in chapter 4, ‘China’s Diffusion Strategy’, the Chinese strategy “is necessarily shaped by constraints” in a way the US approach is not; many of China’s public statements about AI strategy “have focused on creating world-leading capacities in innovation”; China’s approach “is not without companies working on a frontier strategy – DeepSeek is also a major example of this”; Zhou Hongyi of Qihoo 360, through the book’s note 46 citing Mary Hui’s A/Symmetric newsletter of 27 April 2024: “it will be as meaningful as us catching up with foreign countries in super AGI.”; on a definition of AGI: “an artificial intelligence that did not require adaptations to the model to make it highly useful to different industries” (ch. 2, Strategies of Capture, its conclusion); chapter 3, “An Interregnum”, on the twelve months of 2024: “Over the course of a single year” … “the military use of AI had been normalized”; on the diffusion rule, Oracle’s words through the book’s note 111 citing Ken Glueck’s Oracle post of 19 December 2024: “history’s worst government technology idea” (chapter 4, Restricting Rivals, where Oracle also calls it “dystopian” and NVIDIA “misguided”); on the commodity future: “may become an indistinguishable commodity, especially if some form of AI winter comes about and the scarcity of compute becomes a glut” (chapter 2, its conclusion); on OpenAI in January 2024, which “quietly rescinded their ban on using AI for ‘military and warfare’ purposes”, the chapter’s note 1 citing The Intercept of 12 January 2024; “but instead via investors like venture capital, Big Tech, and sovereign wealth funds”; ch. 4, “Hemispherical Stacks”: “In what has been called ‘omnialignment’ or ‘polyalignment’, countries are able to partner with multiple great powers at the same time”, a term he reports in his note to Schindler et al.; the Conclusion: “AI can be beneficial to all, but will it be so equally?” and “this book will not pretend to offer answers”; chapter 1, “Control without Ownership”: “The result of all these activities by Big Tech – investments, partnerships, and acquihires – is the construction of a network of dependencies and influence across the AI start-up scene. Beneath the surface level of competition, therefore, lies a deeper system of centralization – a form of ‘control without ownership’”, the phrase credited in his note 72 to Cecilia Rikap; on the literature on general-purpose technologies: “their value is rarely captured by the inventors themselves to any significant extent. Instead, the imitators and the implementers more often benefit from new enabling technologies”; on AI: “value is currently draining down the AI stack towards the more foundational layers of hardware and infrastructure, with existing tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia likely to capture most of the gains”, the cloud strategy capturing the value “by taking a portion of each use across all its varied applications”; on the Manhattan Project model the believers reach for: “the Manhattan Project model aims at nationalistic control over a leading technology,” meaning “much more government control and oversight, with research and development happening in secret” and development “supported regardless of monetary return on investment”; chapter 4: “as Jeffrey Ding has argued, this story of GPTs leading to power transitions in the international system is underdeveloped”; the chapter “arguing that the United States has an innovation focus, while China increasingly has a diffusion focus”, its sections “America’s Innovation Strategy” and “China’s Diffusion Strategy”; “the American Stargate project is oriented towards building out the largest compute clusters to be made available to one single company in the pursuit of one grand model”, against the “Eastern Data and Western Computing” project, “aimed at decentralized clusters that provide collective compute for many organizations”; after Meta’s November 2024 opening, “A few days later, Anthropic announced that they too would allow their models to be used by the military and that they were partnering with the defence firm Palantir”; “As the year ended, OpenAI announced their own partnership with the defence start-up Anduril”, the chapter’s note 4 citing MIT Technology Review of 4 December 2024; on the turn to the military, chapter 3: “But this doesn’t explain the rapidity of the shift nor the fact that all the leading American AI research labs moved in the same direction. Something more is going on.”; on CUDA: “Big Tech companies including Microsoft, Google, and Meta”; chapter 1’s bubble passage, its first reason: “it seems unlikely that the bubble ending will lead to a significant collapse in equity markets or the broader economy. This is first and foremost because, unlike that earlier period, the major tech companies involved in investing billions of dollars are all immensely profitable with or without generative AI”; its third, on the infrastructure: “Moreover, the investments into the infrastructure of AI today appear to be investments that can be deployed for some time and for alternative purposes – like the laying down of terrestrial and submarine fibre cables in the earlier dot-com bubble”, followed by Pichai’s “long useful lives” through the book’s note 85). In the Sources
• J.P. Morgan, “Powering progress: Financing the infrastructure behind US data center growth,” Technology Exchange, on J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s site, published 11 September 2026, no byline (the bank’s own account of its lending: J.P. Morgan “originated $9.6 billion across two construction loans for the initiative’s Abilene, Texas campus, acting as lead left, sole underwriter and sole structuring agent on both transactions,” the initiative being Project Stargate; the page gives no terms, dates or holders of the loans) In the Sources
• OpenAI, “Announcing The Stargate Project,” 21 January 2025 (“a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States”; “We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately”; the initial equity funders SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX; opened through Browserbase, 18 September 2026 — plain curl returns 403). In the Sources
• OpenAI, “OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites,” 23 September 2025, updated 22 October 2025 (Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; a Midwest site later named as Wisconsin with Vantage; “an additional potential expansion of 600 megawatts near the flagship Stargate site in Abilene”; “In July, OpenAI and Oracle entered an agreement to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate capacity”; the buyer’s own word on the Oracle contract: “In July, OpenAI and Oracle entered an agreement to develop up to 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate capacity. This represents a partnership that exceeds $300 billion between the two companies over the next five years”). In the Sources
• Nscale Ltd, Form S-1 registration statement, filed 18 September 2026 (EDGAR accession 0001193125-26-395475; on 14 October 2025, “in connection with a net lease agreement for a facility in Ward County, Texas”, NVIDIA “agreed to guarantee the Company’s payment obligations pursuant to the Lease Agreement for the first five years of the lease up to a maximum amount of $860.3 million”; “The Company has maintained $470.0 million within an Escrow Fund in connection with the Guarantee as recourse for NVIDIA”; NVIDIA’s warrants “with an aggregate value of $60,000,000”; “In April 2026, OpenAI withdrew from the Stargate Norway and Stargate UK partnerships, with Microsoft subsequently expanding its agreement with us to take the extra compute capacity at Stargate Norway”; the Anthropic Services Agreements of 25 August 2026 “provide for aggregate payments to us of up to approximately $44.6 billion, subject to our satisfaction of specified delivery and service availability requirements”; “As of the date of this prospectus, we have not obtained binding commitments for any of the financings required to fund performance under the Anthropic Services Agreements”; read from EDGAR on 11 October 2026). In the Sources

And 18 more: search the Sources.

Related terms

• Algorithmic efficiency
• Application layer
• Arsenal behind every arsenal
• Capital expenditure
• Clocks of diffusion
• Cluster
• Epoch AI
• Exclusive generation
• Exclusivity of the model
• Falsifier
• Frontier
• General-purpose technology