AIAcademy · AIAcademy · 2026-05-16
Announcing the Stargate Project
The genre is now familiar. "$10 billion. 2 gigawatts. 4 million square feet." Each number sounds load-bearing. Most are not. Here is what they actually mean.
Dollars are the softest number. The $500B Stargate announcement is a target across a decade, not a check. As of February 2026 the project has ~7 GW and ~$400B committed; the original four-year, $100B-up-front framing was already revised inside its first year. Press-release dollars conflate equity, debt, lease, and PPA commitments, often double-count vendor financing, and rarely separate buildings from chips. Treat any total over $50B as a thesis, not a transaction.
Gigawatts are the real number. Power is the binding constraint above ~1e27 FLOP — only a handful of sites worldwide can host a synchronous training run that size. So when Meta describes its Richland Parish campus as more than 2 GW of AI compute capacity and Entergy describes the supporting Louisiana package as more than 5.2 GW of new generation plus 240 miles of 500 kV transmission, ask three follow-ups: where does the power come from, when does it land on the grid, and is there a signed utility agreement or just a letter of intent?
Square feet are vanity. Floor area scales with cooling and aisle layout, not compute. xAI's Colossus 2 in Memphis hit 2 GW with 555K Nvidia GPUs in less than a third of the footprint of some "4M sq ft" pitch decks. Square feet is the number you put in a regional press release.