Musk torches $500B Stargate AI plan, Altman strikes back

The world has been treated to tech bro squabbling over Stargate, the $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, while the grown-ups look on.

The Stargate project was made public on Tuesday during a White House briefing. The plan is to spend the money over the next four years building new AI infrastructure in the US. An initial commitment of $100 billion is set to be deployed immediately.

The initial equity funders are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. OpenAI and SoftBank are leading the project, according to the AI giant.

At least, that's the plan. Yesterday, Elon Musk upended a bucket of scorn on the announcement with a terse message on his social media mouthpiece, X. "SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority."

OpenAI boss Sam Altman responded, "wrong, as you surely know," before inviting Musk to a tour of the first site in Texas, which he said was already under construction.

Musk had earlier said, "They don't actually have the money," to which Altman retorted with the slightly bizarre response: "i genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time." Perhaps he used ChatGPT to come up with something to soothe the ego of a billionaire who is used to getting his own way.

Musk is certainly no friend of OpenAI these days, given the lawsuits he's filed against the organization as it moves toward a for-profit future.

Microsoft is listed by OpenAI as a key technology partner in its AI initiatives. When asked to comment on the furor during a CNBC interview, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, wouldn't be drawn on Musk's comment or speculate on who might or might not have the funds in place for Stargate.

He said, "All I know is ... I'm good for my $80 billion."

Nadella was referring to Microsoft's planned capital expenditure to continue building out Azure, although he was responding to a question regarding Musk's suggestion that the Stargate money was not there.

Later, Musk commented, "On the other hand, Satya definitely does have the money," to which Nadella responded with a "tears of joy" emoji and the words, "And all this money is not about hyping AI, but is about building useful things for the real world!"

While the unfolding spat is unedifying - Musk's frustration with OpenAI is clearly sufficient to override his loyalty to President Trump in this instance - Nadella's words could be read a different way.

We asked Microsoft's Copilot how best to spend a billion dollars. Oddly, it didn't mention AI infrastructure at all. Instead, its top suggestion was philanthropy. ®