By Stephen Nellis and Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – – This week’s announcement by President Donald Trump of a massive private-sector investment to build more AI data centers casts a spotlight on a relatively small and nimble class of cloud computing firms positioned to play a bigger role in the tech sector.
On Tuesday, 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 he said 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.
Missing from the announcement was San Francisco-based startup Crusoe, which was tapped by Oracle to build the first data center for Stargate, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In order to move more quickly and keep capital expenditures down, Oracle contracted out its development to Crusoe and then engaged OpenAI in talks to be a customer, one source said.
Oracle did not return a request for comment. Tech news website The Information last year reported that Oracle had contracted Crusoe to build a data center in Abilene, Texas, for OpenAI.
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. They accomplish this usually 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 such cloud giants as 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. “When AWS and (Google Cloud Platform) build the data center, they think about all these extracurriculars unrelated to AI.” Lambda has not disclosed any involvement in the Stargate project.
The neocloud companies are also routes to market for Nvidia to sell chips to developers. Microsoft, AWS and Google all offer Nvidia chips but also have their own proprietary AI chips that compete against Nvidia’s chips.
Oracle and the neoclouds, by contrast, have tended to work closely with Nvidia rather than offer their own alternative chips.
