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Wiring Capital to Compute

palladiummag.com · 3,247 words · saved by 1 readers

Over a thousand acres of land in Abilene, Texas, lie flattened with graded earth and poured concrete. The foundation pits are filled with conduit bundles and switchgear, and in some quadrants, fully operational substations have been erected. However, other quadrants sit empty, waiting on a schedule that keeps sliding to the right. Although the supercomputer intended for the site is humming with activity, what registers to a visitor is that the campus is only half-alive. Abilene was the intended flagship of the Stargate consortium. Announced from the White House days after President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman stood beside the president as he declared the project’s ambition to pour $500 billion into a combined data center and supercomputer over a four-year horizon. While this signaled Washington’s blessing on a scale once reserved for projects like the Apollo program, those had the federal government as their under

Artem Labunsky/Several cranes Over a thousand acres of land in Abilene, Texas, lie flattened with graded earth and poured concrete. The foundation pits are filled with conduit bundles and switchgear, and in some quadrants, fully operational substations have been erected. However, other quadrants sit empty, waiting on a schedule that keeps sliding to the right. Although the supercomputer intended for the site is humming with activity, what registers to a visitor is that the campus is only half-alive. Abilene was the intended flagship of the Stargate consortium. Announced from the White House da

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