Rain comes in flashes. One minute the roads are powder; the next they’re mud thick, adhesive, the kind that tugs at boots and gums up machinery. Then the storm moves on, the sun returns, and the surface hardens again, cracked and chalky, as if the place is trying to erase the evidence that water ever touched it.
And at dusk, the same conditions that make living there punishing turn the sky into a blaze. Shorter wavelengths fall away and reds and oranges remain.
“This is what it takes to deliver AI,” Altman told CNBC on site in September. “Unlike previous technological revolutions or previous versions of the internet, there’s so much infrastructure that’s required. And this is a small sample of it.”
A small sample: At roughly $50 billion per site, OpenAI’s Stargate projects add up to about $850 billion in spending nearly half of the $2 trillion global AI infrastructure surge HSBC now forecasts.
The Abilene campus already has one data center online, with a second nearly complete. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC the site could ultimately scale past a gigawatt of capacity enough electricity to power about 750,000 homes, roughly the size of Seattle and San Francisco combined.
“The shovels that are going in the ground here today, they’re really about a computer that comes online in 2026,” she said in September. “That first Nvidia push will be for Vera Rubins, the new frontier accelerator chips. But then it’s about what gets built for ’27, ’28, and ’29. What we see today is a massive computer crunch.”
“We are growing faster than any business I’ve ever heard of before,” Altman said, squinting against the sun. “And we would be way bigger now if we had way more capacity.”
Land is cheap. Governments are willing. And the grid, for now, can be persuaded to bend.
In the flatlands of northeast Louisiana, where soybean fields once stretched to the horizon, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is erecting a four-million-square-foot monument to artificial intelligence. He calls it Hyperion, after the Greek titan. When finished, it will consume more electricity than the city of New Orleans and cover a footprint the size of lower Manhattan.
Across the Mississippi River, in West Memphis, Arkansas, Alphabet’s Google has broken ground on what state officials are calling the largest private capital investment in state history a multibillion dollar campus rising from 1,100 acres of scrubland.
Thirty minutes south, on the Tennessee side of the border, Elon Musk has already begun transforming the industrial wastelands of South Memphis. His supercomputer, Colossus, was built in 122 days inside a shuttered Electrolux factory. Now he’s constructing Colossus 2, aiming for a million GPUs and just acquired a third building to expand the complex further. To power the site, Musk bought a shuttered Duke Energy power plant across the border in Southaven, Mississippi.
In southeast Wisconsin, Microsoft is spending more than $7 billion on what CEO Satya Nadella calls “the world’s most powerful” AI data center a facility that will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips when it comes online in early 2026. And in rural Indiana, near Lake Michigan, Amazon has transformed 1,200 acres of farmland into Project Rainier, an $11 billion facility running entirely on custom silicon, built exclusively to train AI models for a startup called Anthropic.
“Cornfields to data centers, almost overnight,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman told CNBC in Seattle in October.
This is the AI boom rendered in steel and gravel a slow carving of the country into zones of power and computation. What they’re building is not infrastructure in any conventional sense. It is the physical manifestation of a belief that intelligence itself can be manufactured at industrial scale, and that whoever builds the biggest factory wins.
“This is the largest market in the history of mankind,” said Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “This is larger than oil, because everyone on the planet needs intelligence.”
