Jan. 21 (UPI) — President Donald Trump announced Tuesday a joint venture called Stargate, which will pump billions of dollars in private funding into artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.
Oracle, Softbank and OpenAI said they plan to spend approximately $500 billion over the next four years on the venture.
“Together these world leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate,” Trump announced in his first full day as president during a White House briefing. “A new American company that will invest $500 billion at least.”
Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chairman, told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that 10 data centers for the project were already under construction in Texas.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison said, as he called it a “very exciting program for Oracle to be a part of.”
“The kind of applications we are building, to give you an idea, may be the most charismatic and the ones I think touches us all is electronic health records. Being able to provide health care plans that are much better than they otherwise would be,” Ellison added, as Trump vowed to expedite their work.
“I’m gonna help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built,” Trump said. “So they have to produce a lot of electricity. And we’ll make it possible for them to get this production done easily, at their own plants if they want.”
SoftBank chief executive officer Masayoshi Son revealed the three companies signed their agreement after Trump’s inauguration Monday “to make this happen.”
“We will immediately start deploying $100 billion with a goal of making $500 billion within the next four years,” Son said.
“After that, artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never ever have thought that we could solve.”
“This is not just for business. This will help people’s lives. This will help solving many, many issues, difficult things that otherwise we could not have solved with the power of AI,” Son added, calling this “the beginning of our ‘golden age,'” in a reference to Trump’s inaugural address.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman said he is “thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America.”
“I think this will be the most important project of this era and as Masa said for AGI to get built here to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here,” Altman said, adding, “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”
“I believe as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate. We will be amazed at how quickly we’re curing cancer and heart disease and what this will do for the ability to deliver very high quality health care, the costs, but really to cure the diseases at a rapid, rapid rate I think will be among the most important things this technology does,” Altman said.
Ellison provided more details about how AI could someday detect and diagnose cancer from a blood test.
“Imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you, and have that vaccine available in 48 hours,” Ellison said. “This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.”
Trump said he has spoken with other companies that have expressed interest in investing in Stargate, and said the venture could create “over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.”
“This is money that would have normally gone to China,” Trump said. “What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country.”
“China is a competitor, others are competitors. We want it to be in this country and we’re making it available.”