Building OpenAI’s Stargate

DATA CENTER DYNAMICS

Stargate initially began as a thought experiment. The current view on training multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is that the more compute you put in (along with ever more data), the better the model. To keep up its breakneck pace in software, therefore, OpenAI needed a similarly aggressive approach to hardware.

“We have a very strong conviction about scaling laws,” Chris Malone, OpenAI’s head of data centers, says. “We’ve seen remarkable improvements in the performance of the models over time, and it seems like that will continue to scale. Now, unfortunately, we’re in the way [of that progressing] on the data center side as we’re short on capacity constantly. One of our main goals is to unlock that.”

The result of this thought process was to conceptualize an extremely large data center, akin in capacity to the entire Virginia data center market - currently home to the world’s largest collection of data centers - in 2025.

Read more | DATA CENTER DYNAMICS

---