The Texas Town at the forefront of OpenAI’s Stargate Project

By | June 2, 2026
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The Texas Town at the forefront of OpenAI’s Stargate Project


The Texas Town at the forefront of OpenAI’s Stargate Project

Abilene, Texas wasn’t known as a technology hub.

Now it’s the first home of Stargate, one of the most ambitious AI infrastructure projects ever built.

Local leaders share what Stargate means for their community, from new investment and infrastructure improvements to the opportunities it could create for generations to come.

This is the story of how a West Texas town became an early part of the future of AI.

Abilene, Texas is the flagship town at the forefront of OpenAI’s Stargate Project. Located in West Texas, this formerly quiet railroad and university city was selected as the site for the massive multi-billion-dollar AI supercomputing campus due to its abundant, low-cost renewable energy and available land. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The Abilene Stargate complex includes the following core details:
  • Infrastructure: Built by AI infrastructure firm Crusoe, the site features a planned $3-4 billion, 4-million-square-foot facility.
  • Operations & Capacity: Capable of drawing up to \(1.2\text{ GW}\) of power—enough for roughly one million homes. The data centers are configured with advanced NVIDIA GB200 AI racks. Portions of the campus are currently operational, powering OpenAI’s advanced AI models.
  • Partners : The flagship campus was spearheaded in collaboration with tech partners Oracle and SoftBank. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

The Texas Town at the forefront of OpenAI's Stargate Project

 

The Texas town at the absolute forefront of OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project is Abilene.

Located in West Texas, this city of roughly 130,000 people has become the flagship “Site 1” for the massive AI infrastructure joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX.

The scale of what is happening in Abilene—and how it’s reshaping the local community—is unprecedented.

🏗️ What is Being Built in Abilene?

The Abilene campus (originally codenamed Project Ludicrous and built on a 1,100-acre site subleased from data developer Lancium) is designed to be a literal “AI factory.”

  • The Mega-Structure: The site features massive, 500,000-square-foot “H”-shaped data center buildings. Oracle’s Larry Ellison noted that 10 of these massive buildings were slated for the initial phase, with room to expand up to 20.

  • The Hardware: The flagship facility is built to house hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA Blackwell chips linked together to train and serve OpenAI’s next-generation frontier models.

  • The Power Draw: The Abilene site alone is scaling up to 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of power. To put that in perspective, just one of these data center buildings will draw about 100 megawatts of electricity—enough to power a city of 100,000 people.

⚡ Why Abilene, Texas?

OpenAI and its building partner, Crusoe Energy, chose this specific pocket of West Texas for two primary reasons:

  1. Surplus Stranded Power: West Texas is covered in hundreds of 300-foot-tall wind turbines. On many days, they generate far more green electricity than the local grid can actually absorb. Stargate is essentially capitalizing on this cheap, abundant, and underutilized clean energy.

  2. Natural Gas Backup: To guarantee the 99.99% uptime required for AI training when the wind isn’t blowing, the site is integrating nearly 30 GE Vernova gas turbines capable of generating massive amounts of on-site backup power.

🤠 How the Town is Adjusting

For a traditional West Texas community, hosting the world’s most ambitious computing project has brought a massive wave of change:

  • The Economic Boom: The project injected thousands of construction jobs into the local economy (peaking at over 6,400 workers on-site). Local small businesses, hotels, and restaurants are experiencing a massive revenue surge.

  • The Water and Grid Debate: Data centers are notoriously thirsty. However, Abilene’s mayor, Weldon Hurt, noted that the site’s highly advanced, low-water closed-loop cooling systems mean its total annual water consumption will only equal what the city of Abilene uses in about half a single day.

  • The OpenAI Academy: To ensure the local community isn’t left behind as a mere “resource colony,” OpenAI is launching its first Stargate Community OpenAI Academy in Abilene. The academy is designed to provide local workers with credentials and direct pathways into high-paying technician jobs at the facility.

The Larger Texas Footprint: While Abilene is the historic first site, the Stargate Project has already expanded its footprint across the Lone Star State. Sibling mega-campuses are currently under development in Shackelford County (a 1.4 GW campus led by Oracle) and Milam County (a 1.2 GW campus powered by SoftBank’s SB Energy).

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