Skip to content
Source · Daily Brief

AI Daily Brief — 23 September 2025

Tuesday belonged to Stargate: OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced five new US data center sites — Shackelford County TX, Doña Ana County NM, Lordstown OH, Milam County TX, plus an undisclosed Midwest location later confirmed as Wisconsin. The reveal pushes planned capacity to roughly 7 GW with more than $400B committed, and puts OpenAI on track to hit the full $500B / 10 GW commitment by end-2025 — ahead of January’s original schedule. Oracle leads three sites; SoftBank leads two, with Lordstown already broken ground and on track for 2026 operation. The announcement was staged as a Texas media spectacle to counter earlier reports of SoftBank pulling back.

Top stories

  • Stargate adds five US sites. Shackelford TX, Doña Ana NM, Lordstown OH, Milam County TX plus an undisclosed Midwest site — bringing Stargate to ~7 GW planned capacity and over $400B in three-year investment. With Abilene and CoreWeave projects, on track to hit the full $500B / 10 GW commitment by end-2025. via OpenAI
  • Stargate split: Oracle leads 3, SoftBank leads 2. Oracle leads Shackelford TX, Doña Ana NM and the undisclosed Midwest site. SoftBank leads Lordstown OH (already under construction, on track for 2026 operation) and Milam County TX (built with SB Energy as a fast-build powered data center). via TechCrunch
  • First Stargate site online in Abilene, Texas. Coverage tied to the Tuesday announcement confirms OpenAI’s flagship Abilene site is operational, with New Mexico and Ohio also under construction. Trump staged the Texas event to push back on SoftBank-pullback critics. via CNBC
  • Stargate framed as substrate for post-GPT-5 scale. Axios coverage ties the five-site rollout to OpenAI’s compute-binding strategy with Oracle and SoftBank, positioning Stargate as the physical substrate for future model generations beyond GPT-5. via Axios
  • Largest single-day data center pipeline disclosure of 2025. Construction Dive frames the five-site announcement as the year’s biggest single-day data center pipeline reveal, with grid-interconnect implications across TX, NM and OH utility queues. via Construction Dive
  • Data Center Frontier: Stargate ahead of schedule. Analysis notes the new sites push Stargate to its full 10 GW / $500B commitment by year-end 2025, ahead of January’s original schedule. Geographic spread reflects power-availability sourcing across multiple grid regions. via Data Center Frontier

Who shipped

OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank co-headlined the day. NVIDIA sat one day removed but central — the Sep 22 $100B letter of intent paired with Tuesday’s site reveal frames the largest AI infrastructure buildout in history. Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta and xAI stayed quiet on launches; their cycles were loaded for later in the week (Anthropic Memory tool beta Sep 29, Claude Sonnet 4.5 Sep 29).

Open-source pulse

DeepSeek V3.1-Terminus from Sep 22 dominated Tuesday’s open-source discourse, with serverless picked up across Vercel AI Gateway, SambaNova, OpenRouter and Novita. Qwen3-Omni similarly continued its rollout across the Hugging Face ecosystem. No fresh major open-source launches dated to Sep 23 itself.

Money, infra & hardware

The day was infra. Five new Stargate sites, ~7 GW capacity, $400B+ committed. The Oracle-led TX/NM/Midwest cluster and SoftBank-led OH/TX cluster reflect a geographic and operator split designed for power availability and grid resiliency. Combined with Sep 22’s $100B NVIDIA-OpenAI LoI, the two-day window marked the largest AI compute commitment ever announced.

Quiet corners

No specific arXiv alignment paper dated Sep 23. No EU AI Act developments. No major model launches outside the infrastructure announcement. Bartz preliminary-approval hearing landed Sep 25, not 23 (despite some calendars showing earlier dates).

By the numbers

  • 5 — new Stargate sites announced
  • ~7 GW — Stargate planned capacity after the reveal
  • $400B+ — Stargate three-year committed investment
  • 10 GW / $500B — full Stargate target, now ahead of schedule
  • 3 + 2 — Oracle-led vs SoftBank-led site split
  • Most-mentioned company: Oracle
  • Quietest segment: open-source releases

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 23 September 2025.