By 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 silt 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 the size of lower Manhattan.
Across the Mississippi River, in West Memphis, Arkansas, Alphabet’s Google has broken ground on what state officials are calling the largest private capital investment in state history — a multibillion dollar campus rising from 1,100 acres of scrubland.
Thirty minutes south, on the Tennessee side of the border, Elon Musk has already begun transforming the industrial wastelands of South Memphis. His supercomputer, Colossus, was built in 122 days inside a shuttered Electrolux factory. Now he’s constructing Colossus 2, aiming for a million GPUs — and just acquired a third building to expand the complex further. To power the site, Musk bought a shuttered Duke Energy power plant across the border in Southaven, Mississippi.
In southeast Wisconsin, Microsoft is spending more than $7 billion on what CEO Satya Nadella calls “the world’s most powerful” AI data center — a facility that will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips when it comes online in early 2026. And in rural Indiana, near Lake Michigan, Amazon has transformed 1,200 acres of farmland into Project Rainier, an $11 billion facility running entirely on custom silicon, built exclusively to train AI models for a startup called Anthropic.
“Cornfields to data centers, almost overnight,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman told CNBC in Seattle in October.
This is the AI boom rendered in steel and gravel — a slow carving of the country into zones of power and compute. What they’re building is not infrastructure in any conventional sense. It is the physical manifestation of a belief — that intelligence itself can be manufactured at industrial scale, and that whoever builds the biggest factory wins.
“This is the largest market in the history of mankind,” said Sameer Dholakia, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “This is larger than oil, because everyone on the planet needs intelligence.”
The money
The sums involved have become difficult to comprehend.
The top five hyperscalers — including Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta — are on track to spend approximately $443 billion on capital expenditures this year. CreditSights projects that figure will climb to $602 billion in 2026 — a 36% year-over-year increase. Their analysts estimate that approximately 75% of that spending will go directly into AI infrastructure.
The current tech industry is among the most profitable in the history of the world, but not all of the companies necessarily have the cash on hand to cover the spend.
The debt raise has been staggering. Hyperscalers have added $121 billion in new debt this year — more than four times the average annual issuance over the previous five years, according to Bank of America. Over $90 billion of that came in just the past three months. Meta tapped the bond market for $30 billion. Alphabet raised $25 billion. Oracle just pulled off an $18 billion bond sale — and Citi says it now ranks as the largest issuer of investment-grade debt among non-financial U.S. companies.
Wall Street expects the pace of borrowing to accelerate.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan estimate AI’s infrastructure push could drive up to $1.5 trillion in additional borrowing by tech companies in the coming years. UBS analysts forecast as much as $900 billion in new issuance coming in 2026 alone.
“There is something inherently uncomfortable as a credit investor about the transformation of the sort we’re facing that is going to require an enormous amount of capital,” Daniel Sorid, head of U.S. investment grade credit strategy at Citi, told investors on a video call earlier this month.
You can see that discomfort in the derivatives market.
Credit-default swaps — insurance that pays out if a borrower can’t service its debt — have widened to multi-year highs for Oracle. Barclays and Morgan Stanley have told clients to buy protection, and in late October, a liquid CDS market tied to Meta began actively trading for the first time as investors rushed to hedge what’s becoming a hyperscaler debt boom.
There’s precedent for debt-funded buildouts outrunning near-term demand. In the dot-com era, telecoms levered up to lay fiber fast. When conditions tightened, many had to restructure. The network survived — but the outcomes ranged from many early investors booking losses, to equity wipeouts.
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