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Stargate's Reality Check: Abilene Is Running, the Other Sites Are Still Foundations

Epoch AI's tracker shows about 0.3 GW live at the flagship Texas campus and six more US sites that are not due until late 2028.

AIApr 17, 20264 min read2 diagrams

Key takeaways

  • Epoch AI estimates roughly 0.3 GW is operating at Abilene, with 4 of 8 buildings running and 1.2 GW due in Q4 2026.
  • Six other US sites totalling about 8 GW are under construction, with projected completion around Q4 2028.
  • Epoch revised its own Abilene estimate in April, a reminder that these figures are outside estimates, not company disclosures.

A year after Stargate was announced as a half-trillion-dollar push to build AI infrastructure in the United States, an independent tracker offers a more granular picture. The flagship campus in Abilene, Texas is partly live. Everything else is still a construction site.

What the tracker found

Epoch AI, a research group that follows AI compute, published a site-by-site assessment of OpenAI's US Stargate projects in April 2026. Its headline: Abilene, the Oracle-built campus that OpenAI uses, has an estimated 0.3 gigawatts operating, with about four of its eight buildings running. The planned total for the site is 1.2 GW, with completion projected for the fourth quarter of 2026. A separate listing for the site puts current compute at roughly 509,000 H100-equivalents, against about 1.0 million projected at full build.

Epoch also corrected itself. An earlier estimate had credited the site with 0.6 GW of operating capacity; on April 23 it revised that figure down and adjusted timelines for the 0.6 GW and 1.2 GW milestones. It also notes that a proposed Abilene expansion to 2.1 GW was dropped. The takeaway is that outside estimates move, and the company-level numbers behind them are rarely published.

Horizontal bar chart of planned capacity in gigawatts at each Stargate US site Planned capacity by site, GW Doña Ana, NM Shackelford, TX Saline Twp, MI Port Washington, WI Abilene, TX Milam, TX Lordstown, OH 2.2 2.0 1.4 1.3 1.2 (0.3 live) 1.2 under 0.3
Planned facility power by site; the filled portion at Abilene marks estimated operating capacity. Lordstown is shown at its upper bound. Source: Epoch AI.

The 2028 cliff

The six remaining sites tell a different story from Abilene. Shackelford County and Milam County in Texas, Doña Ana County in New Mexico, Port Washington in Wisconsin and Saline Township in Michigan show foundations, steel framing or roofing on a first building, and none has operating capacity yet. Epoch's projected completion for all of them clusters around the fourth quarter of 2028. Lordstown, Ohio, planned at under 0.3 GW, shows cleared land and no large-scale data center construction.

Add up the larger sites and the planned pipeline lands in the high single-digit gigawatts, in line with Epoch's view that the overall program could pass 9 GW by 2029. That is a massive build. It is also a build whose payoff arrives in waves: Abilene first, then a gap of two years before the bulk of the capacity.

Timeline showing Abilene online in 2026 and the other sites around late 2028 Apr. 2026 0.3 GW live Q4 2026 Abilene 1.2 GW Q4 2028 Six sites projected Projected dates are Epoch AI estimates; spacing not to scale.
Epoch AI's projected milestones for the Stargate sites. Illustrative layout.

Why it matters

Stargate is often discussed as if the capacity already exists. The tracker is a useful corrective: the entire AI buildout is gated by construction schedules, power hookups and equipment lead times, not just chip supply. A site announced in 2025 may not train a model before 2028. It also shows why the biggest buyers spread bets across many partners; a two-year gap is a long time in a market where model quality turns over every few months.

The caveat cuts both ways. Epoch relies on satellite imagery, permits and public records, and its own correction in April shows how hard it is to read a campus from outside. Where the tracker and company statements differ, neither side should be treated as final.

Chips, partners and scale

Abilene's earliest design was to hold up to roughly 400,000 Nvidia chips, with reporting later describing an arrangement in which OpenAI and Oracle would deploy about 450,000 GB200 GPUs at the site. Oracle owns the chips and OpenAI uses the capacity, a structure that spreads financing risk but also ties OpenAI's compute schedule to its landlord's construction pace. OpenAI and Oracle also announced an additional 4.5 gigawatts of Texas capacity in 2025, taking the stated total to more than five gigawatts at the time.

To put gigawatts in context, a single gigawatt is roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor, and a campus of that size can draw as much electricity as a mid-sized city. The 9 GW that Epoch projects across the program by 2029 would therefore be a significant slice of regional grids in Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. That explains why local utilities, state regulators and community groups have become central characters in an industry that once mainly dealt with chip suppliers.

The tracker also illustrates how fuzzy the word "capacity" can be. Facility power, operating power, chips delivered and chips usable for training are all different measures, and announcements tend to cite the largest. Using H100-equivalents, as Epoch does, is a way to compare across chip generations, but it remains an estimate built from outside evidence.

What to watch

  • Whether Abilene reaches 1.2 GW by the end of 2026, as projected.
  • First operating capacity at any of the other six sites well before Q4 2028.
  • Local power and permitting fights in Wisconsin, Michigan and New Mexico.
  • Official OpenAI and Oracle disclosures, which could settle the gap with outside estimates.

Sources

  1. OpenAI Stargate: where the US sites stand — Epoch AI
  2. OpenAI Stargate Abilene (data center directory) — Epoch AI
  3. OpenAI and Oracle to deploy 450,000 GB200 GPUs at Stargate Abilene data center — DatacenterDynamics

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