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Stargate was a 1994 science fiction film about travellers zooming through a wormhole to an alternative reality. That seems an appropriate name, too, for the massive artificial intelligence infrastructure project promising to invest as much as $500bn in the US over the next four years, announced by President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening. Backed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, Stargate reflects the alternative reality created by the fusion of the AI superbubble and Trump’s re-election. Washington, it seems, is disappearing down its own wormhole.
“This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” Trump said of Stargate. Standing stiffly in their suits alongside Trump in the White House, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s 80-year-old co-founder, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s vauntingly ambitious chief executive, and Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s mercurial chair, all beamed with pleasure, like the personifications of old tech, new tech and global tech.
“This is the beginning of a golden age,” Son said, playing back Trump’s remarks in his inauguration address. “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr President,” gushed Altman. The prominent presence of several other tech billionaires at Trump’s inauguration also highlighted how much they are in thrall to the US president.
Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary blogger and champion of the Dark Enlightenment movement who has a cult following in some west coast circles, has argued that democracy is done and called for a more authoritarian kind of techno-monarchy. Trump’s “first buddy” Elon Musk has already taken to calling himself the technoking of Tesla. But, surrounded by his nerdy courtiers, it could be Trump who has emerged as the technoking of America.
Trump has made it clear that he wants to reassert US hegemony in technology over China, particularly in AI. He has already rescinded his predecessor Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety. He also seems intent on deregulating crypto and reversing the antitrust agenda of the Biden administration to give Big Tech even freer rein. Sniffing profits and new opportunities in the defence, nuclear and space industries, the biggest US tech companies have been quick to applaud Trump’s moves.
These companies already rank among the richest and most powerful in history and need little help from Trump. The independent research firm Arete forecasts that five of them — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — will this year collectively increase their revenue to more than $2tn. In spite of laying out $300bn on capital expenditure, Arete predicts they will still record profit margins and generate free cash flow of $430bn.
Yet three things may yet check their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying between the biggest tech companies themselves as they all make colossal bets on AI and try to disrupt each others’ business models. “Big Tech can no longer deliver growth by staying in their respective lanes,” says Richard Kramer, Arete’s founder. “We expect more Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other’s ‘core’ business, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and ecommerce.”
That competition is also increasingly acquiring a legal dimension as tech companies attack each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he, and others, were duped into investing in the AI start-up because of its “fake humanitarian mission”. He also trolled the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: “They don’t actually have the money.”
Microsoft has testified against Google to break up its search monopoly. As Matt Stoller, author of the Big newsletter on monopoly power, has written, individuals, companies and states may pursue antitrust actions even if Washington holds back. “Antitrust is a body of law that’s designed for business leaders to fight with one another,” Stoller wrote.
However, some leading venture capital investors in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreessen, have also been warning of the dangers of large companies weaponising the government to crush start-ups and stifle innovation. They have been promoting the virtues of Little Tech, which they claim has always been the “vanguard of American technology supremacy”. Vice-president JD Vance, a former VC investor, has in the past supported antitrust interventions to promote competition, arguing against “this weird idea that something can’t be tyrannical if it comes through the operation of a free market”.
One of the biggest determinants of tech policy may simply be who has the greatest access to the technoking’s ear.
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