Trump tech agenda begins with $500B private AI plan and cuts to regulationExecutives from Softbank, OpenAI and Oracle joined Trump at the White House on Tuesday to announce “Stargate," a $500 billion effort to build new AI data centers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/21/stargate-500-billion-trump-ai/
President Donald Trump speaks about AI infrastructure alongside Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Jan. 21, 2025. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President Donald Trump set about defining his new administration’s technology policy Tuesday, hosting industry CEOs at the White House to announce a massive private-sector investment in infrastructure for artificial intelligence that could reach $500 billion.
The announcement came after Trump on his Inauguration Day rescinded a sweeping 2023 executive order on AI from his predecessor Joe Biden that introduced regulations on companies developing AI intended to prevent the technology causing harm.
Trump’s AI policy moves on his first two days in office and remarks at the White House on Tuesday showed him positioning himself as a strong supporter of the U.S. tech industry — while turning away from the Biden administration’s stance that AI technology requires both support and oversight. Biden’s executive order, some of which has been implemented by changes at federal agencies, focused on preventing risks such as algorithms that spread bias or AI assistants that could help terrorists build bioweapons.
“AI seems to be very hot,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday. “It seems to be the thing that a lot of smart people are looking at very strongly.”
Trump was joined by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son who announced “Stargate,” a joint venture that will seek to spend as much as $500 billion over the next four years to build as many as 20 new data centers to support AI projects.
The warehouselike facilities, stuffed with thousands of powerful and electricity-guzzling computer chips, are essential to developing and running AI software like that behind ChatGPT. A boom in data center construction is straining the power grid in states across the United States as companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have spent billions of dollars on new facilities. But AI leaders such as Altman say many more of the facilities must be built for AI technology to keep advancing.
“I think this will be the most important project of this era,” Altman said at the White House on Tuesday. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President,” he said, turning to Trump. Son said that SoftBank decided to move ahead with the Stargate project because of Trump’s election victory.
The $500 billion doesn’t include money from the federal government, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe plans that haven’t been made public. In addition to the companies creating Stargate, Dubai investment firm MGX, an investor in OpenAI, will contribute funding to the project. Microsoft and semiconductor manufacturers ARM and Nvidia will provide technology, OpenAI said in an announcement.
Trump’s industry-friendly first moves on tech policy were not unexpected.
OpenAI has been working on Stargate for months, and its CEO Altman had been pitching politicians on the idea of a major push to build up AI infrastructure a year ago.
Prominent Silicon Valley executives and investors, including some who contributed to Trump’s reelection, had long railed against President Joe Biden’s executive order instituting guardrails for AI technology.
Although certain industry leaders like Altman said some regulation was necessary, critics said the government would only get in the way of the technology’s development and prevent smaller, younger companies from being able to compete with more established ones. Months before the election, Trump allies were already drafting an executive order of their own that would review “unnecessary” regulations and launch “Manhattan Projects” to develop military technology.
Despite Trump’s more industry-friendly approach to AI, his emerging policy is not a complete reversal of his predecessor’s. Biden in the final days of his administration directed federal agencies to speed up the development of AI data center projects on federal land.
Trump said on Tuesday that he supported that policy. “That sounds to me like it’s something that I would like. I’d like to see federal lands opened up for data centers. I think they’re going to be very important,” he said.
Netchoice, a lobbying group with members including Google, Meta and Amazon, welcomed Trump repeal of the Biden-era AI rules. “His orders rolling back regulations on U.S. energy production and ending Biden’s artificial intelligence (AI) red tape wishlist are critical for America’s global leadership in technological development,” Netchoice said in a post on X. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Proponents of AI regulation have argued that it is needed not only to ward off potential harms from the technology but also to support its economic development and adoption by providing people with confidence that AI is safe to use.
“A politically-motivated repeal with no thoughtful replacement is self-defeating for our country and dangerous for our people and the world,” Alondra Nelson, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, who also worked on technology policy in the Biden administration, said in a statement. “This will leave the American public unprotected from the risks and harms of AI and, therefore, unable to take up the benefits it might bring.”
Deborah Raji, a Mozilla fellow and AI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the repeal of Biden’s executive order, in combination with the Supreme Court curbing federal agencies’ power to set and institute regulations last year and Trump’s ambitions to empower business leaders, create a “Wild West era” for AI products. “They’re going to be empowered to build models and throw them everywhere, without a lot of regard to safety,” she said.
AI companies have been spending huge amounts of money buying computer chips and building new data centers to house them. The surge in data center construction has also pushed up estimates for how much electricity the U.S. will need to generate to power them, leading to some coal power plants that had been slated to be closed to be kept online.
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