At Tuesday’s press conference, President Donald Trump announced the creation of Project Stargate, an investment of at least $500 billion to build artificial intelligence-enabled physical and virtual infrastructure, including “colossal data centers” and campuses across the country, with one of its goals involving improving health outcomes.
Trump announced Stargate along with three project partners: Oracle Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.
Ellison said the data centers are currently under construction. The first location is in Abilene, Texas, where 10 buildings are currently under construction, each measuring half a million square feet. Oracle’s chief technology officer said that number will grow to 20 buildings and expand beyond Abilene.
Ellison emphasized the goal of Project Stargate and the type of AI applications it aims to create.
“Not only maintaining electronic health records, but also having electronic health records reviewed and physicians having a better understanding of their patients’ conditions and being able to provide much better health care plans than they otherwise would,” Ellison said.
“A doctor at the Indian River Reservation could see what a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering looks like [Cancer Center] would treat a patient or a Stanford doctor would treat a patient. We are actually making all this information and all this guidance available to doctors who are treating cancer patients or patients suffering from any other disease, which is made possible by artificial intelligence.”
Son said $100 billion would be invested in the project immediately and would reach $500 billion in the next four years.
Abu Dhabi-based technology investment firm MGX will provide funding for the project, NVIDIA will be a technology partner, and Microsoft will offer support.
“This is not just a business issue,” Son said. “It will help people in their lives. This will help solve many, many problems, difficult things that we otherwise couldn’t solve with the power of artificial intelligence.”
The son says AGI – artificial general intelligence – will come soon, but “that’s not the goal.” Then, says Son, comes artificial superintelligence that will “solve problems that humanity would never have thought to solve.”
Altman said he is excited to be a part of the project and expects diseases to be cured at an unprecedented rate.
“We’re going to be surprised at how quickly we cure this cancer and that and heart disease and what that’s going to do to our ability to provide very high-quality health care at a cost, but really, I think we’re going to cure diseases at a rapid rate” will be one of the most significant things that this technology does,” Altman said.
Ellison added that one of the “most exciting” things the group is working on using tools provided by Altman and Son is a cancer vaccine.
“All of our cancerous tumors, little pieces of those tumors, are floating in your blood,” Ellison said. “So you can detect cancer early with a blood test, and by using artificial intelligence to check a blood test, you can detect cancers that pose a serious threat to a person. So cancer diagnosis using artificial intelligence may be as simple as a blood test.”
Additionally, Ellison said that once a cancer tumor’s genes are sequenced, a personalized mRNA vaccine could be developed for each person to vaccinate against that cancer. Ellison said a vaccine could be designed automatically using artificial intelligence in about 48 hours.
Trump says the project will create more than 100,000 American jobs almost immediately and “future the future of technology.”
The president added that the project would provide artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States, competing with China and other players in the space that are rapidly developing their technologies.
During the press conference, President Trump said he would support rapidly build artificial intelligence infrastructure through emergency declarations.
“They need to produce a lot of electricity, and we will enable them to do it very easily, at their own power plants, if they want,” Trump said. “In the AI plant, they will build energy generation.”
Ellison added: “This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.”
A BIGGER TREND
On the first day of his second term in office, the day before the announcement of Project Stargate, President Donald Trump reversed that decision Joe Biden’s 2023 Executive Order for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.
Biden’s executive order aimed to establish standards for the safe and sound and trustworthy development of artificial intelligence in various sectors, including health care.
Among its many provisions, Biden’s executive order ordered: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) establishing a safety program “to ensure the safe, responsible implementation and use of artificial intelligence in the healthcare, public health and human services sectors” and enable the agency “to receive reports of and take action to remediate harm or unsafe health care practices with the participation of artificial intelligence.
Trump’s executive orderPreliminary repeal of harmful orders and enforcement actions”, included the repeal of Biden’s AI executive order, as well as 66 other executive orders signed by Biden and 11 presidential memorandums.
Shortly after President Trump announced Project Stargate, Elon Muskwho was appointed head of the fresh Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), posted the answer to OpenAI’s announcement of a project on X, stating, “They actually have no money,” and later adding, “SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I got it from a good source.”
On Monday, DOGE officially became part of the US government executive order signed by President Trump changing the name of the US Digital Service, created by President Barack Obama in 2014, to the US DOGE Service. DOGE will be established within the Executive Office of the President.