The Trump administration has staked much of its AI credibility on Stargate — a US$500 billion infrastructure push announced alongside Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son. The project was meant to anchor a new era of American dominance in AI. More than a year on, it has yet to move beyond rhetoric.
The Information recently cited three people familiar with the matter as saying the project is effectively at a standstill. The Wall Street Journal had already flagged the trouble as early as July 2025, reporting that not a single data-center construction contract had been finalized six months after the announcement. Investors, The Information added, remain skeptical — unconvinced by a business model at OpenAI that has yet to prove its long-term economics.
Even at launch, the plan drew fire. Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and founder of xAI, argued that OpenAI and its partners simply lacked the capital to pull it off. Those doubts, once brushed aside as rivalry, now look considerably less far-fetched.
Musk moves fast — and builds things
While Stargate has stalled, Musk has been executing. xAI's first facility, Colossus I, went from greenfield to operational in just 122 days. Only 19 days passed between the installation of the first server rack and the start of training operations. In January 2026, Musk unveiled Colossus 2 — described as the world's first gigawatt-scale supercomputing cluster — with plans to scale capacity to 1.5 gigawatts by April.
The contrast with Stargate is stark. One project has broken records for speed. The other has yet to break ground.
The next frontier: AI in orbit
Another central figure in America's AI push is Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia. In November 2025, Huang appeared alongside Musk to discuss "space AI" — the idea that solar-powered AI satellites in orbit could, within five years, become the most economical and efficient form of computing on Earth.
The engineering case, Huang argued, comes down to cooling. Modern supercomputers dedicate the vast majority of their physical mass to thermal management. A two-ton server rack may contain nearly 1.95 tons of cooling equipment alone. In space, heat dissipates through radiation — no water systems required — potentially rewriting the economics of large-scale computing.
Musk has been candid that putting data centers in orbit remains implausible under current constraints. But he has also suggested the timeline may be shorter than most expect.
Article translated by Elaine Chen and edited by Jerry Chen
