Stargate, a $500 billion AI project unveiled by Donald Trump, will exclusively and only serve OpenAI, per the Financial Times.
Stargate, if it goes forward, is likely to become one of the biggest wastages of capital in history.
1) It hinges on outdated assumptions about the importance of computing scale in AI (the 'bigger compute = better AI' dogma), which DeepSeek just proved is wrong.
2) It assumes that the future of AI is with closed and controlled models despite the market’s clear preference for democratized, open-source alternatives.
3) It clings to a Cold War playbook, framing AI dominance as a zero-sum hardware arms race, which is really at odds with the direction AI is taking (again, open-source software, global developer communities, and collaborative ecosystems).
4) It bets the farm on OpenAI — a company plagued by governance issues and a business model that's seriously challenged DeepSeek’s 30x cost advantage.
In short, it's like building a half a trillion dollars digital Maginot line - a very expensive monument to obsolete and misguided assumptions. This is OpenAI and by extension the US fighting the last war.
Last point, there's also quite a bit of irony in the US government pushing so hard for a technology that's likely to be so disruptive and potentially so damaging, especially to jobs. I can't think of any other example in history when a government was so enthused about a project to destroy jobs. You'd think they'd want to be a tad more cautious about this.