It was nearly a year ago, at the end of September 2025, that I stood with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and a gaggle of fellow journalists in the Texas sun at the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas.
We were there for a victory lap of sorts, a media event where Altman and Oracle’s co-CEO Clay Magouyrk touted an expansion of the Abilene site, as well as plans to build five massive, new data center complexes across the U.S. over the next several years. Altogether, the initiative called for hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in a project of a mind-boggling scale.
Senator Ted Cruz, Congressman Jodey Arrington, and local dignitaries including the mayor of Abilene and even a county judge emphasized Texas’ appeal as a hub for AI infrastructure. “Sam, Clay, welcome to Silicon Prairie,” Arrington said on stage.
But even amid the celebratory atmosphere, I was struck by how little public awareness there seemed to be of the sheer scale of what was being built. As I wrote at the time:
“My greater concern is that there isn’t nearly enough public awareness of what’s happening here. I don’t mean just in Abilene, with its mesquite shrubland ground into dust, or even OpenAI’s expanding Stargate ambitions. I mean the vast, almost unimaginable infrastructure buildout across Big Tech — the buildout that’s propping up the stock market, fueling a data center arms race with China, and reshaping energy, land, and labor around the world.”
I wondered whether we were “sleepwalking into the equivalent of an AI industrial revolution”—not a metaphorical one, but in terms of the actual building of physical stuff—without truly reckoning with its costs versus its benefits.
I even asked Altman whether he thought people understood what all the talk about “compute” actually meant in physical terms. “Do you feel like people understand what ‘compute’ is?” I asked him outside one of the Stargate buildings. “No, that’s why we wanted to do this,” he said about the Abilene media event. “I don’t think when you hit the button on ChatGPT…you think of walking the halls here.”
What a difference a year makes.
