Stargate
OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle announced a joint venture intending to put 500 billion dollars into data centres in the United States over four years.
Why it matters
Compute stopped being a cost line and became an infrastructure programme on a national scale.
A hundred billion was to be deployed at once. In order of magnitude that is comparable to national programmes, a highway network or a space programme, but it is a consortium of private companies doing it. The announcement was made at the White House the day after the inauguration, and it set the tone for the year's policy: not to restrain but to accelerate. Doubts about where the funding would come from followed the project, and the pace was revised more than once afterwards.