Tech executives debate Trump’s Stargate AI project

Some of the biggest names in tech clashed after the president Donald Trump presented its private investment project in the field of artificial intelligence worth 500 billion dollars.

Earlier this week, Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank invest billions of dollars to build domestic computing capacity to drive artificial intelligence development in the United States.

The project, called Stargate, was presented on The White House Trump, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The son will be the chairman of Stargate, while the semiconductor company hand, Microsoft, NvidiaOracle and OpenAI will serve as key initial technology partners.

Executives committed to investing $100 billion initially and up to $500 billion over the next four years.

The first blow was inflicted by Elon Musk — a close Trump ally and himself a key figure in AI with his startup xAI — who argued in a post on its social media platform X that the companies involved in the project “actually no money“to finance investments.

“SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I’m fine with that,” Musk added in a follow-up message. Altman, responding to Musk’s accusationssaid. “Wrong, as you probably know.”

“Do you want to visit the first site that is already working?” Altman added. “It’s great for the country. I understand that what’s great for the country isn’t always what’s best for your companies, but in your new role, I hope you’ll mostly put (the U.S.) first.”

Musk heads the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the White House’s primary government efficiency effort. He was Trump’s biggest financial backer in the 2024 election.

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it did concluded an agreement with Microsoft serves as its exclusive cloud provider. The change in attitude was revealed as part of the announcement of the Stargate project.

“I think it’s very important that OpenAI reaches other platforms quickly because Microsoft is building its own artificial intelligence,” Benioff told CNBC. “I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future, they will have their own frontier models.”

“They said very clearly that it was too expensive and too difficult for them and that they wanted to have their own,” the Salesforce executive added. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleiman (as CEO of Microsoft AI) — and Mustafa Suleiman and Sam Altman aren’t the best of friends.”

Microsoft last year appointed Suleiman, a co-founder Google Artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind to to head its new artificial intelligence department.

Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI, having invested billions of dollars in the firm. It also offers OpenAI models on its Azure cloud platform as part of a commercial agreement between the two firms.

CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella on Wednesday expressed concern about the tech giant’s relationship with OpenAI, saying the two continue to have a “critical partnership.”

“Sam (Altman) wants to continue scaling laws to create more computation so he can train more models,” Nadella told CNBC. “We have a right of first refusal. He comes to us first. If we meet those needs, we clear it. If not, he can go to these other providers.”

When asked about Musk’s claim that OpenAI and the other companies involved in Stargate don’t have the funds to cover the initial $100 billion commitment, Nadella said, “Look, all I know is that I ready for his $80 billion.”

In early 2025, Microsoft announced that it plans to spend $80 billion this year building data centers to boost its AI efforts.

“I’m going to spend $80 billion to build Azure,” Nadella told CNBC. “Customers can count on Microsoft.”

– CNBC’s Eamon Javers and Kevin Breininger contributed to this report