OpenAI and its partners are betting $100 billion+ that the fastest way to build a data center is to build a power plant alongside it.
But their Stargate data centers are taking longer and costing more than their competitors'.
OpenAI's build-your-own-power-plant strategy is as radical as it is novel.
For decades data centers had been powered just like every other industrial operation in America. They called up the local utility, submitted a grid connection request, and soon after received electrons from the power grid. But the developers of Stargate believed this path to be too slow.
Rather than wait for a grid connection, OpenAI and its partners have bought everything from jet engines to turbines strapped to semi-trucks. They even tapped a cruise ship engine manufacturer for equipment.
At first, OpenAI’s strategy appeared to be working as expected. Its development partner Crusoe built and powered its first two buildings in 12 months—a faster timeline than any we’ve measured at Cleanview.
Soon after that, the first problems began to arise.
During its first winter in operation, Stargate Abilene went offline for days at a time due to issues with power and cooling equipment, according to The Information’s reporting.
It’s also not clear that the strategy has achieved its goal of building a gigawatt data center as fast as possible.
While Crusoe built the first two buildings of Stargate Abilene in record time, subsequent buildings have fallen behind schedule.
The company began construction on the third and fourth buildings in March 2025. They originally planned to finish in March 2026, according to building permits. But in June 2026 the data centers still aren’t online, according to a recent press release from Crusoe.
These delays allowed Anthropic and its partners to build a gigawatt-scale data center before OpenAI. The data center Amazon built to power Claude now has 1 GW of capacity, according to Cleanview's data center tracker—5 times as much as Stargate Abilene's.
Ultimately grid power, not jet engines, delivered the first gigawatt data center.
I wrote much more about all this in Cleanview's newsletter today. The in-depth story is adapted from Cleanview's behind-the-meter data center report, which we released earlier this month. A free exec summary of the report is available on our website.