Elon Musk, Sam Altman Fight Over Stargate On Social Media

San Francisco: The xAI owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are fighting on X about Stargate, the enormous infrastructure project to build data centres for OpenAI across the US. OpenAI said on Tuesday that it would team up with SoftBank and Oracle to build multiple data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) in the United States, Xinhua news agency reported. The companies expect to commit $100 billion to Stargate initially and invest $500 billion into the venture over the next four years.

"SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility," the joint statement noted.

"They don't actually have the money," Musk wrote in a series of posts on X on Tuesday.

"SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority." Altman fired back at Musk in an X post on Wednesday.

"Wrong, as you surely know," Altman said, responding to Musk's allegation that SoftBank was short of capital.

Altman added that Stargate is great for the country. "I realise what is great for the country isn't always what's optimal for your companies, but in your new role, I hope you'll mostly put America first." xAI, like OpenAI, is hungry for infrastructure to develop its AI systems. Musk's company is estimated to have spent $12 billion on its single data centre in Memphis and could spend billions more upgrading the facility, according to a report by TechCrunch.