Stargate's Sites: Operating vs Under Construction vs Planned

One site running, seven being built

Stargate is the AI data center program announced in January 2025 by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, with a stated $500 billion, 10-gigawatt goal.¹¹¹¹³ Epoch AI, the research group that tracks large AI data centers from satellite imagery and public filings, counts seven US Stargate sites, all showing active development. In its April 2026 overview it put the seven at "over 9 GW of planned capacity", and only one of them, Abilene, Texas, was producing any of it.¹

Six months on, that picture holds. Epoch's dataset, updated October 12, 2026, still lists Abilene as the only Stargate site with operating capacity: four of its eight buildings, which Epoch estimates draw 590 MW of facility power (421 MW of IT load).² Every other site, including the Stargate UAE campus in Abu Dhabi, is in Epoch's records as under construction, with operation projected by Epoch between late 2026 and the end of 2028.² None of the eight is still only on paper: each has at least land cleared and foundations or framing visible.

How Epoch AI tracks a site

Most of the status in the table comes from Epoch's dated notes. For each site it reads commercial satellite images (Airbus and Vantor captures are credited in its overview) and records what is visible on a date: land clearing, foundations, steel framing, roofing, chillers on the roof, a finished substation, parked cars.¹ It cross-checks those against permits and filings, such as Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation construction records for Abilene and Shackelford County, a stormwater permit in New Mexico and a Michigan Public Service Commission document for Saline Township.²

The power figures are estimates built on top of that evidence. Epoch states capacity as total facility power, including cooling and lighting, and converts where a developer reports IT power instead: Vantage reports Shackelford County as 1.4 GW of IT power, which Epoch estimates at about 2 GW of facility power given the Texas heat and closed-loop cooling.¹ Future dates are modeled. For Shackelford County, Epoch takes each building's state-filed construction completion date and adds six months for commissioning; for Milam County, it uses a median of two to two and a half years from land clearing to 1 GW among sites so far, then picks a more conservative end of 2028.² Those projections are the "planned" part of the title. They are estimates of what the build-out could reach, not commitments.

The method also corrects itself. Epoch first estimated 0.6 GW running at Abilene in April 2026, then cut that to about 0.3 GW of facility power after an Oracle post said 200 MW was operational as of April 22. It later dated buildings 3 and 4 as operational around May 23, which is where the 590 MW figure comes from.¹²

Abilene: the one that runs

Crusoe began building the Abilene campus in June 2024, for Oracle. It announced on September 30, 2025 that the first phase was running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, after Oracle began delivering the first Nvidia GB200 racks in June 2025.⁴ Epoch dates building 1 as fully operational around September 26, 2025, and building 2 around December 24, 2025.² Crusoe has disclosed 50,000 Blackwell GPUs per building, which Epoch uses for its compute estimate.¹

The schedule for the second half has moved. Oracle's September 2025 fact sheet expected the seven additional buildings to be complete in mid-2026.⁶ Crusoe's March 2026 release put the second phase, six more buildings bringing the campus to 1.2 GW, at the end of 2026.⁵ Epoch's latest note, from July 28, 2026, describes buildings 5 to 8 as structurally complete and roofed, with fit-out under way, and it projects all eight operating around November 1, 2026, at 1,180 MW of facility power.²

The campus stops at eight buildings for Stargate. Oracle's 2025 fact sheet mentioned a potential 600 MW expansion near Abilene;⁶ Epoch reports that OpenAI later decided against expanding the site.¹ In March 2026 Crusoe announced a separate 900 MW campus next door to support Microsoft, with two buildings of 336 MW of critical IT load each and the first expected to be energized in mid-2027, bringing the whole Abilene site to a projected 2.1 GW.⁵ That campus isn't a Stargate site and isn't in the table.

The Texas, New Mexico and Midwest builds

Shackelford County, Texas is the furthest along of the rest. Vantage's "Frontier" campus is planned as 10 single-story buildings delivering 1.4 GW of critical IT capacity,⁷ powered by an on-site gas microgrid, according to Oracle's fact sheet.⁶ By September 4, 2026, Epoch saw the shells of buildings 1 to 5 complete and roofed, cooling and backup generators going in at buildings 1 to 3, and foundations started for buildings 6 and 7. It projects building 1 operating around August 2027 and all 10 by late 2028.²

Doña Ana County, New Mexico, STACK Infrastructure's "Project Jupiter" for Oracle, has the largest projection in Epoch's dataset: 2,450 MW of facility power by the end of 2028, up from the 2.2 GW in its April overview.¹² In June 2026 Epoch saw graded building pads and structural work on the main buildings, plus a solar array and water basins.² The power plan has been described two ways: Oracle's 2025 fact sheet named Siemens and GE gas turbines in an on-site microgrid,⁶ while the project's own site now says on-site generation supported by Bloom Energy fuel cells.⁹

Milam County, Texas is SoftBank's. SB Energy, a SoftBank Group company, was selected in January 2026 to build and operate the 1.2 GW site, and OpenAI signed a 1.2 GW lease for it.¹¹ Epoch's last dated note, from March 23, 2026, shows steel framing and roofing on building 1.²

Port Washington, Wisconsin is Vantage's "Lighthouse": four buildings totaling 902 MW, scheduled for completion in 2028.⁸ When it was announced in October 2025, the partners called it "close to a gigawatt of AI capacity".³ By July 24, 2026, buildings 1 and 2 looked about half roofed.² Saline Township, Michigan, Related Digital's campus for Oracle, was announced at "more than a gigawatt", with construction pending Michigan Public Service Commission approval and DTE Energy supplying the power.¹⁰ Epoch saw groundwork for building 1 in March 2026, and dates full operation to the end of 2028, based on when DTE is set to deliver maximum load.²

Lordstown, Ohio is the smallest. Epoch describes the site as primarily a SoftBank and Foxconn factory for AI servers and data center equipment, and derives about 300 MW for its data center from OpenAI's statement that Lordstown and Milam County could reach 1.5 GW combined.¹² OpenAI's September 2025 release, as reported by Construction Dive, said the site was on track to be operational in 2026;¹³ Epoch saw active construction with most of the roof on by July 30, 2026, and projects operation in March 2027.²

Outside the US: Stargate UAE

Stargate UAE was announced in May 2025 by G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank Group and Cisco as a 1 GW compute cluster inside a 5 GW UAE–U.S. AI campus in Abu Dhabi, built by G42 and operated by OpenAI and Oracle, with the first 200 MW cluster expected to go live in 2026.¹² It has the oldest evidence in the table: Epoch's latest dated note, from November 16, 2025, shows buildings 1 and 2 partly built. Epoch projects those two operating around December 2026, citing a similar UAE facility that slipped by more than a year, and 1 GW of IT power around January 2028.²

Reading the numbers

Three things keep the table honest. First, operating and planned capacity are never added together: the only operating figure is Abilene's, and every other megawatt in the table is a projection. Second, the two kinds of figure measure different things. Vantage's 902 MW for Port Washington is IT capacity, while Epoch's 1,300 MW for the same site is total facility power,⁸² so the gap between them is mostly cooling and other overhead, not a disagreement. Third, the evidence ages: Milam County's and Saline Township's latest notes are from March 2026, and the UAE's from November 2025.²

Headline totals have changed with each announcement. Oracle's September 2025 fact sheet said Abilene, its planned expansion and three new sites could deliver over 5.5 GW;⁶ OpenAI's release the same day, as reported, put the Stargate pipeline at nearly 7 GW of planned capacity;¹³ Epoch's April 2026 count for seven US sites was over 9 GW.¹ Epoch also flags the risks to its own projections: plans that change after construction starts, as at Abilene, financing and equipment at this scale, and local opposition, including a ban on future data centers in Lordstown and opposition to the Michigan site.¹

Not every large OpenAI build carries the Stargate name. In August 2026 SB Energy, Nvidia and OpenAI announced the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Pike County, Ohio, where OpenAI will be the customer for 8 GW of IT capacity, with an initial 4.25 GW and the first capacity coming online in phases from 2028.¹⁴ That release doesn't call it a Stargate site and Epoch's Stargate tracking doesn't include it, so it stays out of the table, as Announced capacity for now.