OpenAI has struck a sweeping infrastructure agreement with Oracle Corp. to lease about 4.5 gigawatts of data-centre power across the United States, according to people familiar with the terms cited by Bloomberg and other outlets. The arrangement, part of OpenAI’s “Stargate” programme, would provide enough electricity to run millions of homes and is believed to underpin a cloud contract worth roughly $30 billion in annual revenue for Oracle starting in its 2028 fiscal year. To meet the order, Oracle will expand its Abilene, Texas, campus from 1.2 GW to about 2 GW and build additional high-density facilities in states under consideration such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming, New Mexico, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The company has already partnered with infrastructure developer Crusoe on the Abilene project and is expected to work with regional suppliers on the new sites. The deal underscores surging demand for specialised computing capacity as OpenAI scales services like ChatGPT and pursues broader artificial-general-intelligence research. Stargate partners, which include SoftBank, have outlined plans to invest as much as $500 billion over four years to secure long-term access to power-hungry AI hardware. News of the agreement lifted Oracle’s shares 5% to a record $229.98, highlighting investor confidence in the database vendor’s push to compete with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services in the AI cloud market.