MAGA Inc.: The Tech Titans
Image: metamoreworks, Shutterstock.
At Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2016, Silicon Valley was openly hostile to Trump. “Tonight we cry, we despair, and we fear,” tweeted Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at the time. It got worse for Trump - following the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, Facebook and Twitter closed his social media accounts.
(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.)
However, over the next four years, opinions shifted. As Big Tech companies soared in value (today they make up approximately one-third of the U.S. stock market) and Trump’s victory became clear, Silicon Valley decided to cozy up to him. In turn, he welcomed them with open arms.
On January 20, 2025, when Trump was inaugurated as the president of the United States for the second time, he invited the heads of the very same technology companies that canceled him – Facebook, OpenAI and Twitter - to join him in person on the podium for the celebration, together with the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google and TikTok.
The very next day Trump held a press conference at the White House with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle. They were joined by Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank, a technology funder from Japan. Together they pledged to raise US$500 billion for new data centers for AI technology in the U.S.
“I think this will be the most important project of this era. We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President. So thank you very much,” gushed Altman. “Thank you, Mr. President. We certainly couldn’t do this without you. It would simply be impossible. AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison added.
Ellison also took the opportunity to predict what this initiative could accomplish. “Imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you, and have that vaccine available in 48 hours,” Ellison told the assembled reporters. “This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.”
But none of these men were talking about investing in medical research. Their ambitious new plan was to team up to create a consortium named Stargate (after a Hollywood science fiction movie) – to build giant warehouses that would house computer servers.
Unlike Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or Elon Musk of Twitter/X, Altman, Ellison and Son are not household names, nor are their respective companies: OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. So it is worth taking a look at these companies and what their proposal for massive new data centers really mean for everyday Americans.
Data Centers Internet geeks often say that our data is held in the “cloud.” Despite its name, the cloud is comprised of huge physical data centers on the ground that keep multiple copies of everybody’s data in different locations to ensure that the data is always easily accessible from anywhere. Each of these data centers contain thousands of computer servers running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that we can instantly access news, shopping, banking, entertainment and increasingly even education and healthcare. Nowadays we no longer go to the library to look up answers in an encyclopedia or to a cinema to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Instead, when we look for information via Google or stream a Netflix show, a nearby data center pulls that information off a computer on a server and runs calculations to provide the correct answer or show us film scenes in the correct sequence on our phones and computers. Experts are now hard at work trying the create the next generation of software that is called “artificial intelligence,” which is projected to do tasks that equal or rival the human brain such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, writing poems, having conversations and even making lifelike videos. In order to make this happen, computer engineers predict that we will need many times the computing power than we have used in the past and a corresponding increase in the amount of energy needed to run these computers. For example, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) calculated that it takes the same amount of energy to produce a five second AI video as it takes to power an e-bike to travel 84 kilometers (38 miles). Today, there are approximately 59 gigawatts of data servers scattered around the world, and experts project that this will have to more than double to accommodate the demand for AI. |
Stargate
Electricity production ie megawatts and gigawatts of power supplied is traditionally how data center capacity is measured rather than by the number of computer servers it contains. This is because the total power that a facility can safely supply at all times without fail is the best measure of how much computing it can reliably provide. It is for this reason that the biggest data centers are typically built in rural areas with copious supplies of energy to power hundreds of racks of computer servers in large buildings. |
At the inaugural White House event for Stargate, Trump made it clear what the next steps were. “They [will] have to produce a lot of electricity and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily at their own plants if they want,” he told the assembled reporters. “Our country will be prospering like never before. I think that’s true, and it’s going to be the golden age of America.”
The flagship Stargate site will be hosted in the tiny town of Abilene in central Texas, with 10 gigawatts of capacity, installed over five million square feet of floor space. (Right now, the greatest concentration of data centers in the world are in the U.S. state of Virginia where they were built at the dawn of the Internet era in the 1980s, but Texas is racing to catch up.) While many data centers are choosing to use wind and solar power, these systems are not guaranteed to provide constant power. Some 40 percent of power for data centers comes from natural gas plants, which can be built and scaled up fast so long as there is a regular supply of piped gas.
So, as Trump announced, the plan to supercharge AI will depend hugely on an array of energy companies and their financiers. One of the biggest immediate beneficiaries is a major Trump ally - an energy tycoon named Kelcy Warren, the CEO of Energy Transfer LP, a Texas pipeline company.
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