Inside OpenAI's Stargate Megafactory with Sam Altman — The Circuit

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Stargate put that name down in your books because I think you're gonna hear a lot about it in the future a new American company that will invest five hundred billion dollars at least in AI [00:00:14] Speaker 2: infrastructure the data centers are actually under construction the first of them are under construction in Texas the Abilene location which is our first location Abilene is a town on the Western Central Plains of Texas we kind of scratch and fight for everything good that comes our way [00:00:31] Speaker 3: I had people reaching out and they said was the president going to come see you and I said well [00:00:36] Speaker 4: he hasn't text me yet I'm thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America I think this will be the most important project of this era welcome to Abilene Texas this is the site of Project [00:00:52] Speaker 5: Stargate a very mysterious much talked about much speculated about project that brings together open AI soft bank Oracle if it all comes together building after building on this red dirt behind me will be filled with chips that'll power the AI revolution what we're undergoing right now is sort [00:01:12] Speaker 6: of the largest infrastructure bill in human history it's going to create new ways of doing business it's going to create new ways of invention and it's going to really drive humanity forward I was in the real [00:01:21] Speaker 1: estate business these buildings these are big beautiful buildings are going to employ a lot of people how do you [00:01:26] Speaker 7: personally grapple with the pace of it all it does feel like it's going very fast certainly think if I [00:01:33] Speaker 4: could like transport myself back three years ago it would seem like unimaginable progress this is [00:01:39] Speaker 8: amazing explosive growth of intelligence that's coming in our decade everything will change [00:01:47] Speaker 9: when Stargate was first announced there was a lot of skepticism a lot of people thought it's just too [00:01:54] Speaker 6: big to be true so this is your very first look hello Emily thank you so much for having us welcome to Abilene it's so awesome to be here it's all happening I know how many people are on this site today we have about 2200 people on [00:02:18] Speaker 5: the guy at the heart of the Stargate building Abilene is Chase Lockmiller he's the founder of Crusoe the little-known data center startup overseeing this massive project we started construction here last [00:02:32] Speaker 6: June June of 2024 this was just a complete barren field so there was nothing here in June there were a [00:02:38] Speaker 7: mesquite trees and bushes and brush Stargate is so mysterious what actually is happening here what [00:02:48] Speaker 6: will eventually be here is eight separate buildings all containing very large clusters of fully interconnected GPUs yeah we're gonna do a tour of some of that this is gonna get us around the whole [00:03:00] Speaker 9: 1200 acre campus hey we're going on an adventure it's like getting around Jurassic Park [00:03:04] Speaker 7: I love that all right let's go off-roading yeah I feel like we're going on a data center Safari it is [00:03:12] Speaker 5: much like a data center Safari Crusoe's eight planned buildings will hold up to 400,000 chips which would make this one of the world's largest known compute clusters the partners behind Stargate OpenAI Oracle and SoftBank have committed a hundred billion dollars to the project so far and claim they're prepared to put in five times that as they expand to multiple sites this first site in Abilene has been dubbed Project Ludacris as in Ludacris speed Ludacris speed which is appropriate the whole thing is supposed to be done by mid-2026 are you around the clock 24 hours we're around the clock it is very [00:03:53] Speaker 6: much a 24-7 operation we're trying to deliver on you know the fastest schedule that a hundred megawatt [00:03:58] Speaker 5: or greater data centers ever been built so why the ludicrous rush well because Stargate is part of a much larger AI race companies like Microsoft meta Google Amazon and XAI are all building AI data centers of their own at sites across the US and beyond each company wants to have the most capable AI being used by the most people and they've committed tens of billions of dollars to make it happen there's no [00:04:29] Speaker 4: reason we won't scale up our computing 100,000 times in a few years I'm good for my 80 billion I'm going to spend 80 billion dollars building out Azure the downside of being behind is that you're out of position for like the most important technology for the next 10 to 15 years but beyond just making [00:04:45] Speaker 5: better AI many tech leaders want to be the first to create a GI artificial general intelligence a super smart agent that can think and learn just like a human if not better large language models like chat GPT have gotten more capable as the technologies evolved so the hope is that adding an astronomical amount of compute will make them even more capable take me back to the beginning before Stargate what did you start seeing that made you realize we need more compute more power more connectivity that you [00:05:16] Speaker 4: were hitting a limit and needed to scale we used to think a lot about the compute we would need to train the models and what we didn't use to think about as much as how much people are going to use these models and we didn't think about it just turned out people want to use the models much more than we imagined and a couple of years ago maybe after the launch of GPT-4 in chat GPT it really started to hit like oh man this is this is like gone from a lot of compute to like the biggest infrastructure project in history and out of that emerged Stargate why call it Stargate it began as a code name and sometimes code name stick but it means something right oh um the design of one of the very early layouts of a data center looked a little bit like Stargate from from the show how did you get [00:06:03] Speaker 5: to talking with Masayoshi Sun and Larry Ellison and how did you all come together I did two kind of [00:06:09] Speaker 4: long trips around the world and a lot of it was to talk to developers and governments but a lot of it was also to just really try to like get my head around the supply chain on one of those trips I met with Masa and we got to speaking about you know what it would take to do compute at this kind of scale [00:06:25] Speaker 5: Hi Masa it's so nice to see you what conversations did you have with Sam that led to Stargate [00:06:32] Speaker 8: well we have a shared vision of AGI coming soon and we need compute of all the bets you could make why this why Stargate well I believe in the vision that this AI the AGI will change the mankind's life in every aspect and we are lucky to see this enormous revolution and I'd like to be part of that I get excited last month I came to celebrate you are winning and promise that we will invest 100 billion dollars and you told me oh Masa go for 200 now I came back with 500 explain the math to us how does it all add [00:07:25] Speaker 4: up to needing 500 billion dollars well that covers the capacity we think we need for the next few years given our growth projections the interesting question is if we had if we knew how to get a trillion dollars right now which we don't would we be able to deploy that profitably in the next few years and I'm not sure about that but I feel confident we can like make 500 billion of value back [00:07:46] Speaker 6: all right so what are we seeing there's many forklifts there's many cranes there's many dump trucks there's [00:07:54] Speaker 9: many excavators new creatures emerge at every turn are most of the workers from Abilene we're a very [00:08:00] Speaker 6: large employer here in Abilene but we have brought in a lot of labor from outside the city and outside the state we actually have workers from seven different states I've never built anything of this scale it's one of the underappreciated aspects of AI is actually just the physical infrastructure that's needed this is awesome I love building stuff yes there's 155 vehicles that are moving dirt moving earth right [00:08:33] Speaker 9: yeah there's something so satisfying about seeing lots of dirt being moved yeah absolutely if you look [00:08:41] Speaker 5: at that crane like this red crane that's a 600 ton crane I have no like how does that compare to [00:08:48] Speaker 6: other cranes it's it can lift a lot it can lift a lot of weight I mean 600 times that's like a hundred [00:08:53] Speaker 5: elephants right this is actually happening around the world data centers are being built in Malaysia and [00:08:59] Speaker 6: Japan and France I think the demand for compute infrastructure it's not a US phenomenon it is a global phenomenon a lot of countries have actually decided that data centers are our critical [00:09:11] Speaker 9: infrastructure that must be accelerated so if hyperscalers are going to Malaysia or Japan is that [00:09:17] Speaker 6: competition for you oh we don't really see it as competition we kind of see it as you know just an overall growth of the sector we think we have you know a lot of unique ways of doing it and a lot of value to add in the process but you know pretty just excited by everything happening in this space [00:09:33] Speaker 5: Lockmiller's path to leading the Stargate build has been circuitous he's climbed five of the so-called seven summits the tallest mountain on each continent and worked in physics and finance tell me about your [00:09:46] Speaker 10: time before Crusoe you grew up in Denver you started out using AI as a trader on Wall Street [00:09:51] Speaker 6: yeah we were big early adopters of deep learning using these multi-layer neural networks to predict returns for certain securities and you know we found them to be fairly effective I had high conviction that AI was going to transform everything it sort of always felt like this this meta science Lockmiller [00:10:10] Speaker 5: eventually left finance to get into crypto not in the get-rich-quick hyping meme coins way but in the hundreds of computers solving math problems way his idea was to build Bitcoin mining operations near oil rigs taking advantage of a quirk in the oil drilling process when an oil company drills for oil one of the [00:10:30] Speaker 6: associated byproducts of that is natural gas and when they don't have access to a pipeline all of this associated gas is just being burned off on site and so we had this concept that instead of trying to bring that gas to a market where you can sell it we could bring a market to the gas we could build these mobile and modular data centers and bring them directly to the wellhead and then use that power [00:10:51] Speaker 5: the data center it was a good idea with unfortunate timing the crypto market crashed you then went from [00:10:58] Speaker 10: Bitcoin mining to AI it almost sounds like going from one hype cycle to another yeah it may seem like [00:11:04] Speaker 6: that from the outside but I'll say that you know from very early on we we had planned to build an AI [00:11:12] Speaker 5: infrastructure business so what do Bitcoin mining and AI data centers have in common number one they both [00:11:18] Speaker 6: consume a tremendous amount of energy number two they're both more location agnostic than traditional data centers Northern Virginia is largely perceived to be sort of the center of the world for data centers [00:11:32] Speaker 5: today that's data center 1.0 right that's data center 1.0 Virginia's data center alley is where the first generation of cloud computing was built close to the government agencies that created the original internet those data centers are full of CPUs basic computer chips that power everyday things like social media streaming and the cloud Stargate on the other hand is part of a new era of data centers full of GPUs the special advanced chips needed to power AI and do lots of tasks at once so this is the inside of a data center [00:12:06] Speaker 6: this is the inside of a data center under construction okay [00:12:13] Speaker 9: very active construction it is a very active construction so you can take them through one of [00:12:19] Speaker 5: these okay yeah uh okay people look like they were working very hard and fast people never love when I [00:12:30] Speaker 4: show up for data center business uh no why it's not my area expertise and yet I have opinions and so [00:12:36] Speaker 6: people are like okay you know yeah leave us alone so we are going to go to one of the GPU data halls where uh though there will be a very large cluster of uh Blackwell GPUs Blackwell is the newest AI optimized [00:12:48] Speaker 5: chip from Nvidia once the eight buildings of Project Ludacris are complete each of them will hold up to 50 000 chips to be installed by Stargate partner Oracle wow this is where the GPUs will go this is where the [00:13:03] Speaker 7: this is where the AI factory will be all right this is what an AI factory looks like and it truly is [00:13:12] Speaker 6: like a factory but the difference is the the end product that gets manufactured here is intelligence [00:13:19] Speaker 5: and the sooner this AI factory starts up the better for open AI in March the company rolled out a new and improved image generator for chat GPT which quickly became almost too popular to handle [00:13:32] Speaker 4: I've seen viral moments but I have never seen anyone have to deal with an influx of usage like this [00:13:36] Speaker 5: you added a million users in an hour or something like yeah I mean more some hours but yeah it was [00:13:41] Speaker 4: like un unprecedented wild and also like making an image is not a it's not exactly like a low compute task the way we do it with the new image gen you tweeted that the GPUs were melting you yeah I didn't [00:13:53] Speaker 5: realize people were gonna take that literally I I mean I get that it was a joke but it's running very hot but [00:13:59] Speaker 4: like the metal is not actually melting so um we had to do a lot of very unnatural things we had to you know borrow compute capacity from research we had to slow down some other features because it's not like we have like hundreds of thousands of GPUs sitting around just like spinning idly if we had more GPUs we would be more able to handle demand surges like this so it's that directly linked yeah you know [00:14:21] Speaker 6: more compute means we can give you more AI so one of the things to just take note of um is just the amount of stuff uh happening overhead you can kind of see these very large pipes that distribute cold [00:14:34] Speaker 5: water to uh to the individual chips to cool them down the water is needed because GPUs run very hot and keeping them cool typically involves an evaporation process that can consume millions of gallons of water per day that's raised concerns about the sustainability of this AI boom with Stargate though Crusoe says it's bypassed this problem using what's called a closed loop system which keeps the water permanently encased within pipes you can put a million gallons in and then you don't [00:15:08] Speaker 6: need more forever yeah that's that's essentially right we basically fill it one time and then we're done and that's something we can easily coordinate with the city in terms of you know getting a million gallons of water one time it's a far different ask than you know asking for a million gallons an hour or uh some other crazy request which could be the case if you had an open loop uh cooling architecture so once this is all built what's the grand vision give people tools to [00:15:36] Speaker 4: let them do whatever they're going to do better um people will use it and unleash their creative energy and make all sorts of stuff that you and i love or some stuff that we don't um or stuff to just entertain themselves personally the area i'm most excited about is AI for scientific discovery you know we're not there yet but we're not far away i think 2025 will be a world where we have agents do a lot of work but work of the kind of work and things we already know how to do i'm hopeful that 2026 [00:16:02] Speaker 5: will be a big year of like really uh new scientific progress but in order for that to happen buildings full of chips aren't enough you also need energy lots and lots of energy that could be a problem for the climate and a limiting factor in the growth of AI. Sam Altman's been hunting for more compute for a while now and it seems like energy is a big constraint can you explain that like what are the limits? [00:16:31] Speaker 6: uh let me sort of put this in perspective for you if you look at a data center 20 years ago an individual rack in the data center would typically be budgeted to consume between like two and four kilowatts today with the latest and greatest configuration from nvidia you know we budget 130 kilowatts per rack so you're talking about almost two orders of magnitude increase to put it another [00:16:54] Speaker 5: way asking chat gpt a question uses about 10 times as much energy as a google search it is a complete [00:17:01] Speaker 6: transformation in terms of the amount of infrastructure required to support this workload and so that has [00:17:07] Speaker 5: become the major bottleneck so AI data centers can't be located just anywhere you need a location with lots of available power and west texas happens to fit the bill we came to abilene honestly because it's a [00:17:21] Speaker 6: community that's very rich in low cost and clean energy a lot of wind development has happened in around the abilene region and what they lack is actually demand for power that created a massive opportunity for AI which is so hungry for power in this moment this is the first 200 megawatt substation uh right over here there's going to be developed an incremental one gigawatt substation so the total power capacity for the site will be a total of 1.2 gigawatts all right so we're talking bigger than a gigawatt bigger than a gigawatt yeah everybody seems to want a gigawatt or more these days [00:18:00] Speaker 5: if that sounds like a lot well it is enough to power about 750 000 homes 2600 tesla model 3s or 100 [00:18:09] Speaker 6: million led light bulbs there's a funny uh back to the future quote where he says 1.21 gigawatts and because it's 1.2 gigawatts it's kind of funny as more and more AI data centers come online in the next [00:18:26] Speaker 5: few years they'll add many gigawatts of demand to an already overstressed grid according to one estimate data centers could consume more than eight percent of america's electricity by 2035. and while the international energy agency predicts renewables will meet about half that demand the rest will mostly come from coal and gas crusoe is even building its own gas power plant on site as a backup every major [00:18:52] Speaker 10: tech company has this net zero pledge by 2030. are our AI ambitions running directly counter to our climate goals [00:19:01] Speaker 6: it's complicated um my personal perspective is we're you know none of those pledges are going to be met by 2030. um and there's ways of kind of fudging it where like you know you're buying a bunch of wrecks or offsets uh but the actual energy that's being used there's no way it's going to get to 100 percent carbon-free power production to power all of the AI infrastructure that's being developed it's just it's just like fundamentally not possible so the tech companies are lying or fudging that's a that's a good question you're good no look i mean i think i think uh a lot of these goals were ambitious and a lot of the goals uh predated the demand that people are experiencing from AI infrastructure so i think AI has actually kind of changed their uh changed their path now the optimist in me says that while it may get worse before it gets better um there is light at the end of the tunnel um and i think the fact that um AI is a massive tool for invention it's actually going to accelerate the development a lot of a lot of new technologies the fact that we're building a lot of new uh infrastructure that requires a lot of energy uh actually provides this massive opportunity for AI to be uh one of the early adopters of new energy solutions things like small modular reactors geothermal nuclear fusion you know the fact that you know AI has a massive demand for energy puts it in a position to actually intentionally decide what does the energy infrastructure look like that's going to power it [00:20:32] Speaker 5: for now stargate seems to have the resources it needs to accomplish its goals but with huge investments come huge risks bloomberg's brodie ford has been following stargate and the many ways it could go wrong or right for the stargate partners and for the city of abilene thanks for coming [00:20:51] Speaker 11: yeah thank you we got the cactus right behind you too what's your impression of stargate it's happening right i mean there's a lot of naysayers on the internet that nothing of it about it's real but it's clear i mean it is a massive project the fact that they're talking about having you know a gigawatt of capacity live in about two years it's an ambitious target and seeing that in person kind of showed how frantic the whole thing feels a gigawatt is huge oh it's huge it's comically big right i mean nobody was saying these kind of numbers two years ago how does this compare to other big tech projects in other places we've been tracking a lot of the big data center projects i mean data center spending has ramped in the last couple years it passed 200 billion in capex in the last year i think two big projects that people are really watching right now is here in abilene for stargate and elon's build out in memphis both have been thought to be the largest computing clusters at various moments depending on who you ask but i think what unites them is just the fact that they need so many chips and it's the amount of labor coming into them this is to me a very big thing 500 [00:22:01] Speaker 1: billion dollar uh stargate project i think it's going to be something that's very special the number [00:22:07] Speaker 11: 500 billion dollars is that for real i don't think anybody thinks they're going to hit 500 billion maybe i will eat my words softbank has a reputation for buying toward the top for getting into projects once the hype cycle is already pretty advanced i'm very confident uh we don't need 500 [00:22:29] Speaker 8: billion that are in one day we go step by step okay so we are we are very confident to make it happen [00:22:37] Speaker 5: this is a lot of money and you know not all of your bets have paid off where do you get your conviction [00:22:45] Speaker 8: well uh you know sometimes i get uh crazily over excited and i make mistake like we work and you know i have many scars but when you have a conviction and a passion you you actually learn more from those mistakes and the scars and that will make you stronger [00:23:10] Speaker 11: where's the money going like who's the real winner here so yeah i think we've all seen nvidia's stock go up an insane number and said whoa how is that spending ramping so heavily it's these data centers right i mean in what we saw today 400 000 chips that's conservatively 15 20 billion dollars ai holds [00:23:31] Speaker 6: incredible promise for all of us let's talk about oracle yes like what is oracle's role for a long time [00:23:40] Speaker 11: you know the leaders and offering cloud infrastructure forever was you know amazon microsoft to a lesser extent google people weren't taking oracle seriously for a long time but with the ai boom they have shown they're able to make these really vast data centers quickly and so their role here is essentially putting in the servers putting in the fiber optic cable and getting that compute over to open ai i mean the underlying theme here is that open ai and companies like it need as much computing power as they can they're looking for creative ways to you know conjure up those funds and oracle is a company that says oh god you want to pay us to build out these data centers absolutely count us in [00:24:21] Speaker 7: the sizes keep getting bigger yeah and bigger is there a chance we're over building do we need all [00:24:27] Speaker 11: this god every single day somebody has a different take right every single day like we saw with deep seek right that wait a second do we really need all of this infrastructure for those not obsessively [00:24:38] Speaker 5: following every twist and turn in the ai race deep seek is a chinese company whose own ai model went viral in january their ai performed at a similar level to leading u.s models but used far fewer computing resources this raised the question are stargate scale mega projects really necessary deep seek appears to have found a more efficient way to power ai was that a moment of rethink for you and are you doing anything [00:25:05] Speaker 4: differently now i think the deep seek team is very talented and did a lot of good things i don't think they figured out something like way more efficient than what we figured out but do you think there is a more efficient way to oh i'm sure i'm sure we will we have made incredible efficiency strides year over a year and i'm sure we'll keep doing that in the future so if that's the case why are you building all this if we had an ai that we could offer at one tenth of the price of current ai i think people would use it 20 times as much and we would still need twice as much compute to satisfy the then current [00:25:36] Speaker 5: demand some companies seem less sure microsoft for example announced that it was pausing or cancelling [00:25:44] Speaker 11: several data center builds in the u.s and abroad a lot of folks worry that we aren't that far from seeing some kind of pullback some kind of wall it's kind of like how all the big tech companies were hiring every single person they could in 2020 2021 then at one point they started firing people and i think we're at this point where every time a lease gets canceled for a data center people wonder oh did we hit this moment do we really need all of this infrastructure is there really a payoff in the end are folks going to use these tools enough that it's going to pay for all of this build out how confident [00:26:18] Speaker 5: are you that open ai is going to be a financially sustainable and profitable enough company to justify all of this investment it's looking like we're doing really well i mean like we have to [00:26:30] Speaker 4: we are definitely doing something unprecedented uh you know it seems like a i like i feel confident in the bet doesn't mean something can't go wrong what are the risks i mean maybe you know people stop wanting to like pay for ai services and then we have a difficult financial position [00:26:50] Speaker 10: what do you say to the people out there who think this is a massive boondoggle [00:26:55] Speaker 6: look i mean i think there's always going to be doubters um but i i think the again the money piece i think so long as ai is delivering value to society the money will be there to build the infrastructure i have there's no concerns around that um even if it's not all 100 accounted for today that money is there and there's a lot of money that wants to invest in this category what we're under going right now is sort of the largest infrastructure build in human history right this is like where we built the interstate highway system you know that enabled massive interstate commerce and transportation and catalyze this massive boom in the u.s economy what's happening in ai infrastructure is we're building the superhighway system that's going to enable modern intelligence systems that's going to create all sorts of new job categories that don't even exist today it's going to create new ways of doing business it's going to create new ways of invention and it's going to really drive humanity forward [00:27:55] Speaker 5: the data center boom isn't just affecting the ai business there are local impacts too across the country places like abilene are trying to attract data center projects and the jobs and tax revenue [00:28:06] Speaker 3: that come with them i make a dollar a year being mayor so i've i've got to have another business [00:28:13] Speaker 7: so your side business is still the pest control okay i'm a hired killer [00:28:20] Speaker 3: how would you describe abilene well abilene it's an old railroad town you know so we have lots of western heritage but that doesn't mean that we don't want to grow and you know look forward to the future we want our city to grow and we look forward to these opportunities that are coming to us what have you heard about the stargate project it it could quite possibly be the largest ai data center in the world and that excites me to know that we're going to be a front runner in technology right here in west texas [00:28:48] Speaker 11: i've spent the last couple of months looking at some of these biggest projects and trying to see what documents we can find how have these you know some of the world's largest most powerful companies been interacting with these local municipalities largely what we have found is that these local towns are willing to forego quite a bit of tax revenue quite a bit of control to be able to bring [00:29:10] Speaker 7: these big companies in what is abilene giving up to have stargate here so what abilene agreed to with [00:29:15] Speaker 11: stargate with this data center is 85 of tax revenue off the property tax wiped so they're they're losing out on 85 percent yeah i mean i'm sure they would say and the developers would say that you're still getting a lot of property tax revenue and that's probably true right but these are pretty tough deals being struck right i mean i think a lot of these smaller towns did not take place in the tech boom of the last 20 years all of those jobs went to the coasts right and i think there's a lot of local city leaders who want to be able to say we're a part of this and they're willing to strike some [00:29:52] Speaker 7: pretty extreme deals to make it happen you're giving up 85 percent in in tax revenue yeah we're getting [00:29:58] Speaker 2: 15 of billions of dollars so that's the way i look at it right it is a large tax increase we're talking uh millions of dollars on an annual basis it's going to help us to pave streets to hire police officers [00:30:09] Speaker 7: to do the things cities do when you were negotiating did you feel like there was a risk they could go elsewhere like were you worried about not winning the deal whenever you're attracting a prospect yes [00:30:20] Speaker 2: you always worry about that but at the same time if it wasn't going to work for both parties we weren't going to lay down and just get run over by these people either how many jobs do you think stargate [00:30:32] Speaker 3: will really create well i'll tell you what i've heard so somewhere between four and 1200 there's going to be security there's going to be maintenance you know they're going to have grass people are going to mow grass out there so there's going to be all kinds of jobs that go with something that large too [00:30:48] Speaker 11: other than just the technical jobs we think about tech investments and tech campuses as kind of these thousands of high-paying jobs with our really kind of boosting local economy once data centers are completed it's often not a lot of full-time workers how many people does it really take to run a data [00:31:05] Speaker 7: center like i keep thinking about that scene in silicon valley and there's one guy in that data center [00:31:11] Speaker 6: there's really no difference between day and night down here so it makes things easy um there are going to be quite a few people here i know you're looking for a specific number from me [00:31:23] Speaker 10: but i can't give it to you what if they don't create as many jobs as you hope for you know i don't [00:31:29] Speaker 3: know a lot about uh ai centers or how many people they employ i mean i'm gonna be honest about that but you know they're still building the facility they're still putting millions of dollars into the economy and so we're just trusting you know we have to have a little trust with these partnerships [00:31:48] Speaker 9: we're in downtown abilene right now it's really windy i can see why this is a good place for wind power oh we just wanted to talk to people to see what they think about stargate if they've heard of it um so we're gonna go try to find some folks and not blow away so have you heard of stargate i have [00:32:07] Speaker 12: been until recently i had not have you heard of stargate no it was announced by trump and that's [00:32:13] Speaker 13: that's kind of really all that i've heard i know that it has to do with ai and is supposed to bring [00:32:18] Speaker 14: maybe a lot of people to abilene it's going to be a big server farm yeah and and employ quite a few people what do you think about that computers are good things i'm a computer guy i did that in the army [00:32:29] Speaker 13: i invented computers oh you invented computers yeah what do you hope it brings to abilene i would love to see more people here and especially like it would help local businesses for abilene for west [00:32:39] Speaker 14: texas i think it creates a a huge stream of jobs that aren't readily available meth and alcohol addiction is huge in this area because one of the only jobs available is oil and gas and so this adds something different and and hopefully break some of those cycles do you have any concerns like about [00:32:55] Speaker 9: like how much power they're going to use or water and you know i know that ai takes up a lot of power [00:33:02] Speaker 15: to use but i'm not too sure what exactly it'll do to abilene i i feel like i'm not concerned on that [00:33:08] Speaker 16: side of things it's going to use a lot of power does that concern you what's wrong with that well it might put some stress on the abilene grid oh i need to increase the grid then what do you think about ai [00:33:21] Speaker 12: ai has terrified me for 20 years i think there are so many questions that we don't have answers to when it comes to ai i think we're biting off way more than we can chew do you use ai at all i actually [00:33:35] Speaker 15: do use ai yeah our professors at acu uh sometimes recommend that we use it i think it's a good thing i think it can be used two ways either creatively or kind of a crutch so how do you feel about the fact [00:33:48] Speaker 5: that abilene is going to be the site of this big development i love i love jobs coming to abilene but [00:33:57] Speaker 12: i i'm not excited about it where are we going and how do you even fight it the big picture to me is ai is going to take over and then where are we as humans you know i just it terrifies me it [00:34:11] Speaker 5: honestly just terrifies me well it makes reviews there's definitely a lot of questions we'll have to see how the project pans out and it's going to happen over years so it could be a while before we know for sure there is this lofty promise that ai data centers are going to create thousands and thousands of jobs meantime ai is destroying jobs elsewhere and i feel like even you know there is serious anxiety out there people are scared totally even among the best engineers and technologists people are scared what do you say to those people ai is for sure going to change a lot of jobs totally [00:34:52] Speaker 4: take some jobs away create a bunch of new ones this is like the kind of this is what happens with technology and in fact i think if you look at the history of the world like that's just been happening for a long time the thing i think the world is not ready for like people have maybe abstractly thought like okay it's going to be a better programmer than me it's going to be you know better at customer support whatever i don't think the world has really had the humanoid robots moment yet like the first day you're like walking down the street and there's like seven robots that walk past you doing things or whatever it's going to feel very sci-fi and i don't think that's very far away from like a visceral like oh man this is going to do a lot of things that people used to do so so yeah it's coming and we we have always tried to just be super honest about what we think the impact may be realizing that [00:35:35] Speaker 5: we'll be wrong on a lot of details lately predicting the future of ai seems harder than usual [00:35:44] Speaker 1: in a few moments i will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs [00:35:52] Speaker 5: president trump's tariffs and the increasing volatility of geopolitics have created potential challenges for the ai infrastructure boom and shaken up the race to dominate ai between the u.s and china [00:36:03] Speaker 17: technology faces rising costs building these data centers just got considerably more expensive it is so it's very difficult to immediately decouple uncertainty is bad for business instead of moving forward people have war rooms about oh what's [00:36:22] Speaker 5: tomorrow going to look like former diplomat anya manuel and bloomberg's shireen ghaffari have been closely watching how this could impact projects like stargate how much does the ai and data center supply [00:36:33] Speaker 18: chain depend on china yeah so a lot of the materials that are used to build data centers a lot of those materials actually come from china right aluminum steel china's a major manufacturer that could be an area of impact on raising construction center costs now on the chip side that's a much bigger higher cost for these companies right and that there's a lot more uncertainty the most sophisticated chips are [00:36:58] Speaker 17: manufactured in taiwan korea japan often brought to china to be integrated into all of the electronics that are in all of our pockets this is a really complex totally international supply chain and i think the takeaway for everyone is you cannot just break the international trading system and we cannot be a country that lives in autarky we're always going to depend on others what does stargate mean for the u.s china tech race i think it's one critical step in so many steps when you look at the race that's on between the u.s and china we're in a real race the chinese are giving us a run for [00:37:36] Speaker 19: their money china's right behind us i mean they're we're very very close 50 of the world's [00:37:41] Speaker 17: ai researchers are chinese that doesn't mean we can't collaborate with the chinese and it certainly means we should keep talking to them but where you used to have some level of trust and some level of communication now you don't have it and i worry that the tariffs not directly but indirectly are making us lose that kind of trust now that we're in this position there's obviously this [00:38:03] Speaker 5: tension between the u.s and china is this an opportunity to do it a different way to build [00:38:09] Speaker 17: data centers a different way i think that's exactly right this is an opportunity to do it differently what i would like to see is that more advanced manufacturing of the most sophisticated chips happens here and i think tsmc is doing some of that others the chips act really helped also going back to stargate those data centers and all of the ai training and the ai inference shouldn't just be happening in the united states it should be happening in friendly allied countries as well iceland greenland the nordics that have lots of geothermal power should be a part of it europe should be a part of it japan our friends in asia singapore there's really an opportunity here to have a community of like-minded countries that are doing this together is president trump alienating [00:38:54] Speaker 5: many countries that would be our allies in this endeavor yes some of our friends and allies feel a [00:38:59] Speaker 17: little bit alienated i hope ultimately that won't be the case i think increasingly the administration will understand how important our partners are and how much they add to us and so i actually believe [00:39:14] Speaker 5: we'll come out okay in the end there are still many questions about where the business of ai is headed the expense of building and running these data centers makes it tough to turn a profit open ai for example ran a 5 billion dollar loss in 2024 and there's no guarantee that simply adding huge amounts of compute will make ai models smart and reliable enough to be truly transformative so as solid and substantial as stargate might seem it's surrounded by uncertainty about how smart ai can get which bets will pay off and what kind of future we're creating [00:39:55] Speaker 7: the tech industry goes through booms and busts ai goes through winters and springs [00:40:01] Speaker 6: how long is this boom going to last i think this boom has quite a bit of legs um to it you just sort of look at the long-term investments that the biggest companies in the world are making in this and i think you know even with things coming out like deep seek uh you know i think everybody's pretty unanimous in terms of we're staying the course what's required for ai to scale is a lot more infrastructure um and there's a bigger risk to under investment than over investment [00:40:29] Speaker 5: if chat gpt were to discover a stargate a futuristic wormhole that we could all travel through [00:40:36] Speaker 4: what's on the other side if chat gpt could like transport us to the future yeah yeah i mean no no no one knows right do i think i could have sat here in 1905 and told you what we were about to discover in physics and that 40 years later we would like have an atomic bomb definitely not uh i and i i think i am way too self-aware of my own limitations to sit here and try to say i can like tell you what's on the other side of that wormhole i have no idea but that not good yes up and down not better in every way but yeah i think up into the right yeah up into the right the right yeah up into the right yeah up into the right yeah up into the right yeah up into the right [00:41:22] Speaker ?: so so so so so so you