President Trump announces Project Stargate, a $500 billion US government-backed AI infrastructure development plan.

This week's announcement by President Donald Trump of a massive private-sector investment to build more AI data centers has cast a spotlight on a new class of cloud computing firms. Trump said that ChatGPT creator OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and others will pour up to $500 billion in private capital into a joint venture called Stargate, which will build data centers and create more than 100,000 jobs in the United States. One goal of the project, said Trump, is to keep the U.S. ahead of China in the global race for supremacy in artificial intelligence.

Among the key players missing from the public announcement is San Francisco-based startup Crusoe, which was tapped by Oracle to build the first data center for Stargate. Oracle contracted out its development to Crusoe and then engaged OpenAI in talks to be a customer. Crusoe is among a crop of newer companies—which according to chip research firm SemiAnalysis also includes CoreWeave, Nebius Group and Lambda—that are building cloud computing offerings specifically for the needs of AI companies, typically by amassing huge troves of Nvidia chips linked for specific kinds of AI work. In Silicon Valley, these firms are known as "neoclouds" because their AI focus sets them apart from cloud giants like Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and Amazon Web Services, all of which serve both general corporate customers and their own parent companies.

"This is a potential wakeup call that smaller companies can move faster," said Robert Brooks IV, vice president of revenue at Lambda, referring to the Stargate plan. The neocloud companies serve as routes to market for Nvidia to sell chips to developers, as Microsoft, AWS and Google all offer Nvidia chips but also have proprietary AI chips that compete against Nvidia's offerings. By contrast, Oracle and the neoclouds have tended to work closely with Nvidia rather than offer their own alternative chips. As Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein who follows the semiconductor industry, said: "It feels like (Nvidia) got another big purchaser. These are not players that look like they're building their own chips at this point."

Crusoe is building its own Abilene data center that will hold 100,000 specialized AI chips per building when it comes online this year, and the company was able to hand over the first building for tenant improvements within six months—something that would have normally taken several years, according to Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller. Crusoe is developing pre-fabricated components that speed up data center construction, similar to how pre-fabricated homes reduce on-site construction time. CoreWeave, another neocloud company, is targeting an initial public offering this year at a valuation of $35 billion. Meanwhile, Elon Musk raised questions about the ability of SoftBank and OpenAI to fund the project, though reports indicated that a portion of the funding could be raised as debt and that each company would put $19 billion toward the effort.