(Bloomberg) -- In a small Texas city nearly 200 miles west of Dallas, the first data center associated with the $100 billion Stargate venture from OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. is taking shape.About 875 acres in Abilene, or roughly the size of New York’s Central Park, have been set aside to construct data centers, according to city documents seen by Bloomberg News. Oracle facilities that Chairman Larry Ellison has said are for Stargate are being developed on this land, according to people familiar with the matter. When it’s done, these data centers will help power cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems from OpenAI.While the space for the data centers is massive, the number of guaranteed full-time jobs is not. The project must create at least 57 full-time positions earning an average wage of $57,600 annually, according to the documents, though the final tally could be higher.The details, some of which have not previously been reported, hint at both the scale of the ambition for Stargate and the uncertainty around its future job creation potential. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced the venture alongside Ellison and other tech executives, and said it would create “over 100,000 American jobs.” In a blog post, OpenAI went further and said these investments, which are expected to include infrastructure projects across the country over the next few years, would “create hundreds of thousands of American jobs.”
On Thursday, Trump doubled down on his efforts with an executive order, calling for an AI policy that his team said would “make America the world capital in artificial intelligence.”Typically, however, data center projects like the one underway in Abilene aren’t huge job creators. They result in far fewer long-term employment opportunities than traditional tech campuses. While there is an initial burst of construction roles to build these facilities, data centers require minimal full-time staff once they’re operational.OpenAI-backer Microsoft, for example, employed just 325 people across all its data centers in Texas, according to a report from the company published last April. The software maker expects to have 791 full-time employees and contractors in its operational facilities in Texas by the end of 2026 and nearly 3,000 construction jobs, the report said.
In Abilene, the 57 promised jobs is simply a minimum guarantee at just one Stargate site. The Development Corporation of Abilene has said it expects there to be 100 “high-skilled” jobs from just the first phase of developing the site. A spokesperson for Crusoe Energy Systems, one of the site’s developers, also said it expects there to be more than 100 full-time jobs in roles like data center technicians, turbine plant operators and maintenance work. There are currently over 1,000 construction workers on site, Crusoe said.An OpenAI spokesperson said the site in Abilene is “the first of many we will be building across the country through the Stargate Project, which we know will generate hundreds of thousands of construction jobs — electricians, carpenters, laborers, truck drivers — in the same way historically large infrastructure projects create such hard hat jobs.” Oracle and Softbank didn’t comment.In a policy proposal released by OpenAI in November, the ChatGPT maker outlined how building an unprecedented 5-gigawatt data center campus — enough to power entire cities — would create or support more than 44,000 jobs in Texas, and a comparable number in other states. That figure included 14,000 construction jobs as well as indirect employment from worker spending in the area, according to the report.The data centers in Abilene will be smaller than that. Crusoe said in July that the first phase of the project will be for a 200-megawatt data center, with plans to expand to 1.2 gigawatts of power.By almost any standard, the Abilene construction is a huge project, reflecting the growing computing needs from tech companies to build more advanced AI services. In Texas, 1 gigawatt is typically enough to power 200,000 homes. And the space for the facility will be correspondingly sprawling.
“The first of them are under construction in Texas — each building’s half a million square feet,” Ellison said on Tuesday during the White House press conference. “There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 in other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first.”On that plot of land in Abilene, data centers already leased to Oracle are being built by Crusoe, Blue Owl Capital Inc. and Primary Digital Infrastructure, with financing from JPMorgan Chase & Co.The overall cost of the project has been eased somewhat by tax breaks from the city. Abilene has given the data center project an 85% discount on its property taxes for the two decades of operation, according to the city documents. Taylor County, which contains Abilene, has also inked an abatement agreement for the project.
Construction on the Abilene project must be completed by August 2026, according to the city agreements with Crusoe and Lancium, an energy startup which is listed as the main developer of the site.
--With assistance from Dina Bass, Natalie Wong and Natalie Lung.
