A total of $11.6 billion in new funding is going into a massive data center under construction in Abilene, Texas.
The financing comes from Crusoe, which will operate the facility, and investment firm Blue Owl Capital. With this round, the total committed to the project now stands at $15 billion. Once complete next year, the Abilene site is expected to be the largest data center used by OpenAI.
The facility will consist of eight buildings, each capable of housing up to 50,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips. These chips are specifically designed for training large language models. Until now, OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft’s infrastructure, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the company was dissatisfied with the available capacity. In response, OpenAI struck a separate deal with Oracle, which will lease the site for 15 years and supply the hardware.
Abilene marks the start of Stargate
The Abilene facility is part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to expand its own infrastructure and reduce its dependence on outside providers. Back in January, CEO Sam Altman announced the so-called Stargate project alongside SoftBank and Oracle. Stargate is a planned network of AI data centers, backed by a proposed $500 billion investment. The announcement quickly drew criticism—including from Elon Musk—who questioned the project’s funding. Meanwhile, Musk’s own company xAI is also scaling up to hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
Abilene is seen as the first concrete piece of the Stargate vision. Altman described it on X as the world’s largest AI training facility. OpenAI will lease server capacity at the center through Oracle. So far, details about Stargate—such as other potential sites—have not been made public.
