Tech CEOs spar over Trump’s Stargate AI project

Some of the biggest names in technology have clashed after President Donald Trump unveiled his $500 billion private AI investment project.

Earlier this week, Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in ramping up domestic computing capacity to boost AI development in the United States.

The project, dubbed Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Son will be the chairman of Stargate, while semiconductor company Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and OpenAI will serve as key initial technology partners.

The executives committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years.

The first blow was thrown by Elon Musk — a close ally to Trump and himself a key figure in AI with his startup xAI — who claimed in a post on his X social media platform that the companies involved in the project “don’t actually have the money” to fund the investment.

“SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added in a subsequent post. Altman, replying to Musk’s allegation, said Wednesday: “Wrong, as you surely know.”

“Want to come visit the first site already under way?” Altman added. “This is great for the country. i realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [the U.S.] first.”

Meanwhile, in a cryptic X post on Thursday, Altman said: “just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself…”

Musk chairs the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a major White House government efficiency effort. He was Trump’s biggest financial backer by far in the 2024 election.

On Wednesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff suggested the investment plan could create tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft, who are close partners.

OpenAI said Tuesday that it had ended an arrangement with Microsoft to serve as its exclusive cloud provider. The change in relationship was disclosed as part of the Stargate Project announcement.

“I think it’s extremely important that OpenAI gets to other platforms quickly because Microsoft is building their own AI,” Benioff told CNBC. “I don’t think that Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future, they’ll have their own frontier models.”

“They’ve said it very clearly that it’s too expensive and too hard for them, and that they want to have their own,” the Salesforce chief added. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleyman [as Microsoft AI CEO] — and Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman are not best friends.”

Microsoft last year appointed Suleyman, a co-founder of Google’s AI lab DeepMind, to lead its new AI division.

Microsoft is the single largest investor in OpenAI, having plowed billions of dollars of investment into the firm. It also offers OpenAI models on its Azure cloud platform as part of a commercial arrangement between the two firms.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed concerns surrounding the tech giant’s relationship with OpenAI Wednesday, saying that the two continue to share a “critical partnership.”

“Sam [Altman] wants to continue with scaling laws to build out more compute in order for him to train more models,” Nadella told CNBC. “We have right of first refusal. He comes to us first. If we meet those needs, then we clear it. If not, he can go to these other providers.”

When asked about Musk’s claim that OpenAI and other companies involved in Stargate don’t have the funds to make up the total $100 billion initial commitment, Nadella said: “Look, all I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion.”

Microsoft announced at the start of 2025 that it plans to spend $80 billion this year on the construction of data centers to boost its AI efforts.

“I am going to spend $80 billion building out Azure,” Nadella told CNBC. “Customers can count on Microsoft.”

– CNBC’s Eamon Javers and Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report