OpenAI and Oracle halt Stargate Texas expansion over power delays

OpenAI and Oracle have halted plans to expand their Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas beyond its planned 1.2 gigawatt capacity after power supply delays pushed additional infrastructure availability out by at least one year. Of the eight buildings Oracle leased at the site for OpenAI, only two are complete, currently housing approximately 400,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips. Rather than wait, OpenAI is pivoting its next hardware deployment -- Nvidia's forthcoming Vera Rubin chips -- to more than half a dozen alternative data center sites across multiple U.S. states.

The Stargate campus in Abilene was positioned as a flagship of the U.S. AI infrastructure buildout, with OpenAI's compute manager describing the existing facility as "one of the largest AI data center campuses in the country." The pause reveals a hard constraint that ambition alone cannot solve: electricity supply. AI data centers require enormous and reliable power, and the grid is struggling to keep pace with demand. The capacity shortfall could delay OpenAI's ability to scale its most advanced models and may reshape which companies lead in frontier AI development over the next 12 to 18 months.