Trump to Announce New AI Investment Push With OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle

(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump is expected to announce a new investment push for artificial intelligence led by Softbank Group Corp., OpenAI LLC, and Oracle Corp., with the three companies preparing to announce a joint venture worth billions of dollars.

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Trump will be joined by Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison to announce an initial $100 billion investment — which could scale up to $500 billion over the next four years — on Tuesday afternoon, according to a White House official.

Oracle’s shares jumped about 6% on the news. The company’s stock is up about 56% over the past year. Softbank’s American depositary receipts rose as much as 5%.

Trump is signaling a wide-ranging approach to ensure US leadership in the emerging technology. Two weeks before taking office, he announced a $20 billion investment from Dubai-based billionaire Hussain Sajwani for new data centers across the US. On Monday, shortly after his swearing-in, he rescinded AI guardrails imposed by Joe Biden and signed a series of measures to boost US energy development to meet a surge in power demand from data centers.

The announcement was first reported by CBS News. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It’s unclear if the initiative, which the companies are dubbing “Stargate,” is in addition to or part of the $100 billion that Son pledged SoftBank alone would invest during an event with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate last month.

At the time, Son said the Softbank effort would create 100,000 jobs focused on artificial intelligence and related infrastructure, including investments in data centers, semiconductors and energy.

“I would really like to celebrate the great victory of President Trump and my confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory,” Son said at the time.

Despite the public pledge, there were immediate questions over where SoftBank would get the capital to fund its initiative. The company had 3.8 trillion yen ($25 billion) in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet at the end of September. Still, the company’s finances have recovered with the initial public offering of chip design firm Arm Holdings Plc.

Trump has cozied up to Silicon Valley since winning a second term, with prominent executives including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai joining him at the US Capitol on Monday for his inauguration.

OpenAI’s Altman has spent months trying to form a global coalition among government and industry leaders to support boosting the supply of chips, energy and data center capacity to support the development of AI. The company also pitched the Biden administration on the need for massive data centers that use as much power as entire cities.

SoftBank previously invested in OpenAI’s most recent fundraising round. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told Bloomberg News last month that it was drawn to SoftBank because the company has “access to lots of capital” and is prepared to invest that money, including “in areas like power and data centers.”

Cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., and Oracle have been racing to expand computing capacity by constructing new data centers. Oracle has already committed billions to build out new data centers — the company is expected to double its capital expenditures this fiscal year to over $14 billion, in large part due to these projects.

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