Does Sam Altman Need Donald Trump, or Is It the Other Way Around?

Late yesterday afternoon, the president of the United States transformed, very briefly, into the comms guy for a new tech company. At a press conference capping his first full day back in the White House, Donald Trump stood beside three of the most influential executives in the world—Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank—and announced the Stargate Project, “the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.”

Although Trump’s rhetoric may seem to suggest otherwise, Stargate is not a new federal program but rather a private venture uniting these three companies with other leaders in the AI race, such as Microsoft and Nvidia. The new company—for which Son will serve as chairman and OpenAI will be in charge of operations—will spend a planned $500 billion over the next four years to build data centers, power plants, and other such digital infrastructure in the United States, all in hopes of developing ever more advanced AI models. Trump presented Stargate as a victory for his “America First” agenda, saying that it may “lead to something that could be the biggest of all”—an apparent reference to superintelligent machines. The executives concurred, speaking of AI’s potential to generate cures for cancer and heart disease. “It’s all taking place right here in America,” Trump said.

Although the project will likely produce many jobs and generate some value for the companies involved, it is hard to ignore the feeling that Trump needs this more than any of the men he was standing beside. “It’s an honor that they want to come to our country” for their AI-infrastructure build-out, Trump said of these “three great people, great CEOs, and great geniuses.” Over the course of roughly 45 minutes, he said seven separate times that it was an honor to host them, adding, “For Larry to be here and do this is very unusual, because he doesn’t do this stuff; he doesn’t need it.”

He may be correct, and not just about Ellison. Altman has reportedly proposed similarly massive AI-infrastructure projects to investors in the Middle East and computer-chip makers in Asia. Just this week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer-chip giant Nvidia, visited China—America’s biggest geopolitical foe—apparently thanking local staff and lauding his company’s contributions to “one of the greatest markets, the greatest countries in the world.” SoftBank is a Japanese corporation. Oracle has substantial investments and AI infrastructure in the Middle East. A United Arab Emirates firm, MGX, is Stargate’s fourth initial financial backer, and the British chip manufacturer Arm is a technical partner alongside Nvidia. In other words, AI development is proceeding within, but also outside of, the U.S., Stargate or not. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

As such, the project may be less a vote of confidence in Trump’s vision for America so much as the latest sign of the country’s capitulation to the AI industry, which has repeatedly pushed for lenient regulations and invoked the specter of China to clear a path for rapid development. (Although, to be clear, tech giants have done plenty of capitulating to Trump too.) Trump emphasized that his role is to welcome these companies and get out of the way: “We’re going to make it as easy as it can be,” he said. He also referenced China more than once. “China is a competitor; others are competitors. We want [AI] to be in this country,” he said, later adding, “This is money that normally would have gone to China.”

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AI may well change the world, but the announcement provided little in terms of specifics of how it would get there. Despite promises of AI-enabled cancer vaccines and personalized medicine, exactly how the technology will revolutionize the military, biology, or any other industry is unclear, and the path to “superintelligence” is hazier still. Even if generative AI yields productivity gains and speeds up medical research, there will be trade-offs: The technology and its infrastructure are as likely to displace millions of jobs, require massive natural-gas and nuclear power plants to meet tremendous electricity demands, raise consumer energy prices, and take up substantial public land. Even some AI enthusiasts expressed skepticism: Elon Musk broke with Trump by publicly bashing the announcement, posting on X that SoftBank doesn’t “actually have the money” to support Stargate. (Altman called this characterization “wrong” in a post of his own.)

To hear these companies tell it, however, the path forward is all but inevitable. Put together, major American tech companies are already spending perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars a year developing their technology with a questionable path to profit. Instead of acting as a deterrent, those costs have been spun into a selling point. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Nvidia, and their competitors are fond of touting the lucrative sums—$100 billion, or perhaps $7 trillion—their technology will require, as if to say: This will be big. Don’t miss out. They have seemingly willed demand into existence.

In an interview after the press conference, Altman said that Stargate “means we can create AI and AGI in the USA. It wouldn’t have been obvious this was possible—I think with a different president, it might not have been possible—but we are thrilled to get to do this. I think it will be great for Americans.” Now the White House is fully embracing tech executives’ messaging. But all of this started well before Trump’s inauguration. Ellison himself said that Stargate had been in the works for “a long time,” and the nationwide build-out of data centers, power plants, and transmission lines is well under way. Days before his term ended, Joe Biden signed an executive order for “advancing United States leadership in artificial intelligence infrastructure,” which would open up federal lands for data-center construction. (Trump, when asked if he would rescind the order, responded, “No, I wouldn’t do that. That sounds to me like something I would like.”)

[Read: Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI]

Winning the generative-AI race would, in Trump’s telling, be a display of his geopolitical and economic might. But only a day into his presidency, Stargate showed Trump taking cues from China, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Biden all at once—from a foreign adversary, the tech giants he vilified in 2020, and a political rival he has ruthlessly vilified. During yesterday’s briefing, Trump read a statement that the tech executives had apparently prepared. “This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” he said, looking up from the dais and grinning at the final two words. “New president. I didn’t say it; they did. So I appreciate that, fellas.” Altman and the others knew exactly how to play this. Trump—and the rest of the nation—is merely tagging along.