(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump announced a joint venture to fund multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence infrastructure with executives from Softbank Group Corp., OpenAI LLC and Oracle Corp., an effort aimed at accelerating the development of emerging technology.
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“We’re starting by investing heavily in our country at levels that no one has ever seen before,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.
Trump was joined by Masayoshi Son of Softbank, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle. The joint venture will deploy $100 billion “immediately” and aims to scale up to “at least” $500 billion in AI projects, including data centers and physical campuses, Son said. Companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. should also participate.
The president said he would use emergency declarations and executive actions to facilitate construction projects, including easing access to energy. During their speech, Trump and his leaders highlighted potential applications of AI in health care and other areas that could fuel U.S. economic growth.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison said.
However, the real scope of the new commitments announced remains unclear.
Son visited Mar-a-Lago last month to announce that Softbank would spend $100 billion during the next presidential term, and Tuesday’s announcement was inspired by that effort, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ellison said some of the data centers envisioned for the project were already under construction, and OpenAI has also already detailed its plans to invest in AI infrastructure.
More than 400 stocks in the S&P 500 rose Tuesday, with the index up nearly 1%, on expectations that Trump would unveil the new AI investment push. Oracle shares rose 7%, while a closely watched exchange-traded fund that tracks companies exposed to AI rose to a three-year high.
Trump announced a far-reaching approach to ensuring American leadership in AI. Two weeks before taking office, he announced a $20 billion investment from Dubai-based billionaire Hussain Sajwani for new data centers in the United States. On Monday, shortly after he was sworn in, he repealed Joe Biden’s AI guardrails and signed a series of measures aimed at boosting U.S. energy development to respond to an increase in energy demand from data centers.
