OpenAI has agreed to lease 4.5 gigawatts of computing power from Oracle in a deal worth around $30bn a year that is one of the largest cloud agreements to date for artificial intelligence.
The deal marks a big expansion of OpenAI’s “Stargate” data centre project, which it launched with SoftBank in January to gain access to vast amounts of computing power to develop its powerful AI models and meet consumer demand for products such as ChatGPT.
Oracle will develop multiple data centres across the US in order to satisfy the new Stargate contract, according to people close to the plans, which were first reported by Bloomberg. The roughly 4.5GW would be equivalent to about a quarter of the US’s current operational data centre capacity.