• Project Stargate reveals power-plays in the tech landscape.
• Oracle positions itself carefully, Nvidia absent.
• MGX and SoftBank hedge their bets.

Returning President Donald Trump has certainly hit the ground running with a slew of announcement and executive orders that have reverberated around the world. While some pronouncements are entirely domestic, such as the mandate that Federal employees should return to their offices rather than work from home, and the powers of border agents to summarily repatriate illegal immigrants, others have further-reaching consequences.

In the technology world, we’ve seen $TRUMP and $MELANIA Solaris-based tokens appear, pronouncements on an EV ‘mandate’ that will gladden the hearts of Chinese car manufacturers, and an announcement that the US wants $500bn ploughed into AI infrastructure and development in the magnificently-titled Project Stargate.

The plan behind Stargate is to ensure the US’s dominance of AI technology continues for decades to come, with $100bn available immediately, and the remaining funds to be gathered over the next five years. But the public launch of Project Stargate was notable for the identities of its founding participants and those who were not among them.

SoftBank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, was present for the carefully-managed photo-shoot at the announcement, but a fourth party, MGX, didn’t appear. It’s an investment company established in 2024 by the government of the United Arab Emirates as an investment vehicle for AI technology, and comprises of MGX itself and G42, an AI development holding company.

G42 is known more widely in the Middle East and North Africa for its ToTok app, one that’s as avaricious for its users’ data as similarly-titled TikTok. A $100m investment G42 made in ByteDance (TikTok’s owners) was withdrawn in early 2024 in order not to raise the ire of policy-makers in the US and thus paving the way for MGX’s involvement in Stargate.

Also present at the Project Stargate announcement was Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, a company yet to turn a profit, and that relies on Microsoft to continue its operations. Elon Musk, notably missing from the roster of players involved, has his own skin in the game in the form of xAI, a competitor to OpenAI. He’s termed Altman a “swindler” and is suing OpenAI for anti-competitive practices.

Musk also thinks that SoftBank is only a minor player in Project Stargate, saying that “SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that on good authority.” In a post-truth era, where repetition equates with fact, that’s as true as Charlie Brown’s statement that the world is made of snow, or indeed, anything else currently ‘trending’ on Twitter.

But the big absences from the Project Stargate initiative were Nvidia and Microsoft. In the case of the latter, there was at least presence by proxy – the company has invested recently in MGX and owns 49% of OpenAI. Nvidia on the other hand is a different matter. Despite companies and nations racing to produce alternative hardware that will power the AI bubble, it still controls 80% of the world’s AI chip market, and experienced growth of around 200% per quarter in 2024.

The company may be sore that its largest potential markets, China, is all but forbidden it in the current xenophobic climate, and can only stand on the sidelines as the Chinese government ramps up its investments to produce an alternative hardware manufacturing capability. But given that Nvidia is the de facto choice in the US to stock the nascent data centre building programme that Project Stargate entails, it will likely be a big recipient of government and investor dollars over the next five years.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison was present at the Stargate launch, although his company’s involvement in data centres largely comprises leasing others’ facilities. His appearance among the first participants in the project is more likely down to the fact that Oracle’s share of the cloud and AI market is behind that of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s. By positioning himself so carefully next to Donald Trump as part of the next wave of AI investment, he gains the favour of the mercurial president and the hope that his company’s overall standing in the cloud data market improves.

TikTok’s US data reserves currently sit on Oracle’s rented infrastructure, which makes Ellison’s Oracle the logical choice to inherit the valuable service’s control in the near future. Although relatively a small win in monetary terms, the high-profile nature of TikTok in domestic politics will mean that should Oracle run ByteDance’s US operations, the company will return to being a household name in the country, something it hasn’t been for some decades. That in turn will boost Ellison’s cloud and AI ambitions, something that the inevitable rift between Trump and Musk will cement.