Stargate's 9 Gigawatts
The Stargate project — OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank’s half-trillion-dollar data center buildout — is no longer a vague White House announcement. Epoch AI’s site-by-site survey of all seven US locations reveals a concrete infrastructure programme that will consume more electricity than New York City by 2029. That’s 9+ gigawatts of planned capacity across Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, with 0.6 GW already live in Abilene. To put this in perspective: the total AI compute available on Earth at the end of 2025 — every H100, every A100, every MI300 — could be replicated with what Stargate alone plans to deploy. This isn’t scaling AI. This is building a parallel power grid.
What makes the Stargate buildout analytically interesting isn’t the headline number — it’s the energy design choices that betray how broken the US grid connection process has become. At least three of the seven sites will run on on-site natural gas microgrids rather than waiting for utility grid connections, which can take over a decade to permit in the US. The Shackelford County, Texas site will be powered entirely by an on-site gas microgrid. Doña Ana County, New Mexico is getting two gas microgrids. This is AI infrastructure explicitly designed to bypass the electrical grid, not integrate with it. When your most cutting-edge technology initiative is being powered by fossil fuel generators bolted onto the campus, something has gone seriously wrong with energy policy. OpenAI has pledged to “pay its own way” and fund grid upgrades, but the sites that are furthest along are the ones that sidestepped the grid entirely.
The water story is equally telling. At least six of the seven sites will use closed-loop liquid cooling systems that don’t evaporate water — a direct response to the backlash over Texas data centers consuming an estimated 50 billion gallons of water while the state faced drought conditions. This is a genuine engineering improvement, but it’s also a cost trade-off: closed-loop systems are more expensive to build and operate. Stargate is paying a premium to avoid the PR disaster of drinking towns dry while running chatbots. The Wisconsin “Lighthouse” site goes further, committing to 70% renewable power from solar, wind, and battery storage. But this is one site out of seven. The majority of Stargate’s capacity will run on natural gas.
The political dimension is where this gets genuinely concerning. Lordstown, Ohio — originally pitched as a manufacturing and data center hub — has already seen a ban on future data center construction from local authorities. Michigan’s Saline Township site faces local opposition. These are early signals of the same backlash pattern that’s played out in Ireland, the Netherlands, and parts of Virginia: communities realising that data centers consume enormous resources while employing relatively few people. The IEA projects global data center electricity use will more than double by 2030 to over 1,000 TWh, and the US accounts for the single largest share of that growth. Stargate is the concentrated expression of a trend that will reshape energy markets, local politics, and climate commitments in ways that no one — least of all the companies building these facilities — has fully reckoned with. The $500 billion price tag doesn’t include the externalised costs: the grid upgrades, the water infrastructure, the gas pipelines, or the carbon that three gigawatts of on-site natural gas will produce. AI isn’t just consuming compute anymore. It’s consuming the physical world.
Sources
- OpenAI Stargate: where the US sites stand
- Trump-backed Stargate Project could strain the US energy grid
- OpenAI commits to ‘paying our own way’ for Stargate energy
- Power generation challenges could overshadow Stargate
- Stargate Project SW Fact Sheet - MediaJustice
- Global energy demands within the AI regulatory landscape
- Energy demand from AI — IEA