“Money is not the issue. Power is.” What Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) has been shouting since 2024 has become reality. In December 2025, under the full support of the US government, the largest AI infrastructure project in history, Stargate, led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, was officially launched.

The investment scale alone is a whopping $500 billion (approx. 650 trillion KRW). Money equivalent to South Korea’s annual budget is poured into a single data center project. As a VC Associate, I analyze the trickle-down effect this massive flow of capital will have on the startup ecosystem.

1. Project Overview: Scale Beyond Imagination

‘Stargate’ is not just a data center. It is a project to build a massive AI City.

• Location: Desert areas in Texas and Arizona, Midwest USA (Ease of solar power generation).
• Power: 5 Gigawatts (GW). It consumes the equivalent of 5 nuclear power plants. Contracts have been signed with Small Modular Reactor (SMR) startups for this.
• Chipset: Millions of next-generation GPUs (Blackwell and subsequent models) will be mounted.

2. Why $500 Billion?

Training GPT-6 and GPT-7 is impossible with current infrastructure. Even combining all GPUs currently existing in the world is insufficient.

2.1 The Final Gateway to AGI

SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son betted, saying, “For AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), time cost is more important than financial cost,” and “If we can advance it by 10 years, even 1000 trillion won is not a waste.” This project will be the physical cradle of AGI’s birth.

2.2 US Government’s ‘Tech Sovereignty’

The US Secretary of Commerce was present at the project announcement. This means Stargate is not just a private project, but a US AI security asset. It is a national winning move to secure overwhelming dominance in the AI hegemony competition with China.

3. Impact on Startup Ecosystem (Trickle-down Effect)

Where will this astronomical amount of money flow? Herein lie investment opportunities.

3.1 Renaissance of Energy Startups

5GW of power must be supplied in an eco-friendly way.

• SMR (Small Modular Reactor): Massive R&D funds will flow not only to listed companies like NuScale Power but also to next-generation nuclear fusion startups.
• Cooling Technology: Startups possessing ‘non-conductive liquid cooling’ technology to cool data centers in water-scarce desert regions are the #1 M&A targets.

3.2 Semiconductor Design Houses

Nvidia chips alone are not enough. Demand for custom NPUs (Neural Processing Units) specialized for specific calculations will explode. It is a unique opportunity for Korean chip design (Fabless) and design house startups.

3.3 AI Infrastructure Software

‘MLOps’ technology to efficiently schedule millions of GPUs and recover errors is now a necessity. It is said that “Raising GPU utilization by just 1% saves hundreds of billions of won.”

4. Concerns and Risks: Acceleration of ‘Winner Takes All’

But where the light is bright, the shadow is also deep.

1. GPU Black Hole: If the Stargate project sucks up global GPU production, poor university labs or early startups might not even see a GPU. The ‘gap between rich and poor in computing resources’ will become extreme.
2. Model Monopoly: Only a few big techs will own AGI. No matter how well the open-source camp (Meta Llama, etc.) performs, the gap in physical infrastructure is hard to close.

5. Conclusion: Ride the Wave

$500 billion is large enough to distort the market. Now, every tech startup’s IR material should include “How can we contribute to the Stargate ecosystem?”.

VCs are already moving. Pay attention to ‘infrastructure-building infrastructure’ companies such as energy, materials, and hardware rather than software (SaaS). The unicorns of 2026 will be born there.