In Abilene, Texas—in the heart of what locals call the Big Country, long defined by ranching and farming and now dotted with wind turbines—OpenAI and Oracle staged a carefully crafted media showcase on Tuesday, ushering reporters through an 800-acre data center complex packed with tens of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs.

The event was a victory lap of sorts, as CEO Sam Altman and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouryk pushed back against critics who have questioned the progress of their high-profile and ambitious “Stargate” AI infrastructure project .

At Tuesday’s event, the two companies, joined by Japan’s SoftBank, announced a big step forward for Stargate, touting an expansion of the Abilene site, as well as plans to build five massive, new data center complexes across t

See Full Page