Microsoft and OpenAI Plan $100 Billion AI Supercomputer called Stargate

Microsoft is set to expand its collaboration with OpenAI, despite recently hiring most of Inflection AI's staff, including its co-founder and CEO, Mustafa Suleyman. Although Microsoft holds a 49% stake in OpenAI, it does not have control over the company's actions. However, the two companies maintain a close collaboration, with OpenAI being one of the most prominent startups in the realm of generative AI. Microsoft is now embarking on creating the world's most expensive data centre in partnership with OpenAI, a supercomputer facility dubbed "Stargate," which is expected to cost over $100 billion.

The project is estimated to take six years to complete, with the AI supercomputer potentially becoming operational as early as 2028. "We are always planning for the next generation of infrastructure innovations needed to continue pushing the frontier of AI capability," a Microsoft representative told Reuters.

Microsoft has already invested billions in OpenAI since 2019, with OpenAI's cloud infrastructure running on Microsoft Azure. The planned data centre project is part of the ongoing collaboration between the two companies. Currently in the planning phase, Microsoft, which recently regained its position as the world's most valuable company, is searching for a suitable location within the US to accommodate the project.

The project is divided into six phases, with Stargate being the fifth phase. Presently, the companies are in the third phase, focused on building multiple supercomputers to further enhance the performance of ChatGPT. The fourth phase will involve the creation of an even more powerful supercomputer, expected to be completed by 2026, which could be used to power OpenAI's new voice recognition or text-to-video AI tools.

The entire project could cost OpenAI and Microsoft collectively as much as $115 billion, with $100 billion expected to be spent between phases four and five.

In comparison to typical data centres, which can range from $250 million to a couple of billion at most, the substantial cost of the Stargate project is largely due to the advanced AI requiring more power, advanced hardware-based cooling, a higher number of advanced silicon components, and greater cloud storage and processing capacity.

As Microsoft and OpenAI continue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, the Stargate project represents a significant investment in the future of AI research and development.