OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is accelerating its global AI infrastructure expansion by selecting Argentina as one of the business sites for 'Stargate,' a massive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure construction project. According to local Argentine media and foreign reports, OpenAI has signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with Argentine energy company SurEnergy to promote an investment project worth up to $25 billion (approximately 35.7 trillion Korean Won).
The core of this project is to establish a 500MW (megawatt) data center in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced in a video message, "I am proud to announce plans to launch an exciting new infrastructure project in partnership with SurEnergy," introducing it as the first 'Stargate' project to be undertaken in Latin America.
'Stargate,' which OpenAI announced in January with the American software and cloud company Oracle and the Japanese investment firm SoftBank, is an unprecedentedly massive AI infrastructure project expected to inject a total budget of $500 billion (approximately 700 trillion Korean Won) over four years. This scale is 2.5 times the annual total global investment in data centers and is interpreted as a strategic move to secure high-performance computing resources essential for training massive AI models and to lead the AI hegemony race.
Through the 'OpenAI for Countries' concept, a global expansion of the Stargate project, OpenAI is focusing on building customized AI ecosystems in cooperation with governments worldwide. In fact, OpenAI began operating its first base data center in Abilene, Texas, USA, last September, announced plans to establish a large-scale data center in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in May, and commenced its first Stargate project in Europe two months later. Furthermore, it is showing an all-around expansion by looking for local partners in India for the construction of a data center of at least 1GW (gigawatt).
During his recent visit to South Korea, CEO Altman met with executives from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, promising a partnership focused on expanding the supply of advanced memory chips essential for next-generation AI and increasing data center capacity in Korea, thus solidifying the cooperation system with Korean companies. This series of actions suggests that OpenAI has made global AI infrastructure construction its top priority and is rapidly reshaping the landscape of the worldwide AI industry based on massive capital and technological power. The investment in Argentina is expected to serve as a bridgehead for creating an AI ecosystem in the Latin American region, further strengthening OpenAI's global infrastructure network.
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