In January 2025, Sam Altman stood alongside President Trump at the White House, announcing the most ambitious infrastructure project in AI history. The $500 billion Stargate initiative promised to transform OpenAI from a model company into an infrastructure empire. Six months later, the reality is far more complex and revealing than the headlines suggested.
Indeed, good news: just yesterday, it was announced that OpenAI is tightening its partnership with Oracle—a first $30 billion per year deal—to deliver 4.5 gigawatts of capacity as part of Stargate. For context, that is enough power for 3.5 to 4.5 million homes across the US.
Yet, and that is the thing, it seems SoftBank was not involved, and that is not good news.
The brutal truth: OpenAI remains an infrastructure beginner, not an infrastructure owner.
While they’ve successfully escaped Microsoft’s partnership prison, they’re still years away from the vertical integration that defines true AI empires. Understanding this gap between ambition and reality reveals crucial insights about the future of AI competition.
Let’s see, though, how OpenAI is progressing along the AI stack, based on where Stargate goes.
OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft started as a fairy tale. Microsoft provided the infrastructure, OpenAI delivered the AI magic, and both companies counted their billions. But beneath the surface, a strategic nightmare was unfolding.
The breaking point came with the Windsurf acquisition attempt. When OpenAI tried to buy the AI coding startup for $3 billion, Microsoft blocked the deal because it would compete with GitHub Copilot. That moment crystallized a brutal reality: your infrastructure partner was actually your strategic jailer, preventing moves that might threaten their competing products.
Mat Velloso’s departure from Microsoft captured the insanity perfectly: “How do you share your product plans with another company that’s actually competing with you?” The answer became obvious – you don’t. You break free.
The dependency created four critical vulnerabilities that threatened OpenAI’s future. Economic constraints meant sharing revenue with a competitor who used that money to build competing products. Technical limitations prevented hardware-software optimization that could improve modelperformance. Strategic constraints blocked acquisitions and partnerships that Microsoft deemed threatening. Most critically, competitive intelligence flowed directly to a rival building their own AI products.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
