The year AI tech giants, and billions in debt, began remaking America

West Texas dust, iron-tinged and orange-red, rides the wind and sticks like a film to everything you touch. It clings to skin and the inside of your mouth, a fine grit that turns every breath into a reminder of where you are. This is the landscape where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is orchestrating something called Stargate — a fast-expanding constellation of data centers, backed by partners including Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

Some 6,000 workers’ vehicles pour into the site each morning. Tires raise a constant veil of grit over a construction footprint the size of a small city — more people working this single campus than OpenAI employs across its entire payroll.

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 compute 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 compute 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.

Altman is not alone in building kingdoms.

Zuckerberg’s Hyperion and Musk’s Colossus

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…