OpenAI and oracle are set to begin construction on a massive new data center in Texas within the next few months. This facility will be a key part of the Stargate infrastructure project and will be equipped with tens of thousands of Nvidia's high-performance GB200 GPUs.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the data center will be located at Oracle's Abilene facility in Texas and is expected to house 64,000 nvidia GB200 chips by the end of 2026. These GPUs will be installed in phases, with the first batch of 16,000 units scheduled for installation by this summer.

An OpenAI spokesperson later confirmed that the company is partnering with Oracle to design and build the Abilene data center, with Oracle overseeing the operation of the supercomputer being constructed there.

The data center marks the first facility of the $500 billion Stargate initiative, a project announced earlier this year in collaboration with OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, with Nvidia and Arm serving as key technology partners. The three companies initially plan to invest $100 billion into Stargate, with that figure increasing to $500 billion over the next four years. The project will begin with a single data center in Texas, but OpenAI has previously stated that Stargate could expand to as many as 10 data center campuses.

The cost of GB200 chips alone for the first Stargate data center will amount to several billion dollars. While Nvidia has not publicly disclosed the price of the GB200, estimates can be drawn from the slightly lower-performing B200 chips, which are priced between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit. Based on this, the total cost of Nvidia chips for the first data center could reach approximately $2.6 billion.

In addition to the Texas site, OpenAI and SoftBank employees have scouted locations in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon for potential future Stargate data center campuses. Sources also revealed that Oracle already operates real-time cloud computing infrastructure in Salt Lake City, making it another potential location for expansion.