The U.S. Is Selling Allies an AI Model It Can't Build at Home

The model Washington is selling its allies has a name: Stargate. Announced in January 2025 by President Trump, OpenAI, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi's MGX, it was pitched as a $500 billion buildout of AI data centers — the template other countries were meant to follow ^[1]. Seven months after the launch, the template had not raised its money or broken ground.

A lot of parties are involved. Time is needed to form a consensus. — Yoshimitsu Goto

OpenAI, the project's anchor, was at the same moment warning the White House of an "electron gap" between the U.S. and China that "threatens national security and AI competitiveness" ^[2]. The pitch and the product were arriving misaligned. The gap is not a matter of will. It is physical. Satellite data suggests roughly 40% of U.S. AI data center projects may miss their 2026 completion dates by more than three months, held up by shortages of pipe fitters and electricians, tariffs on Chinese transformers, and utilities that cannot expand power fast enough ^[3]. Of 3,969 announced projects, only 802 are under construction ^[4]. The grid itself is the choke point: U.S. reserve margins sit around 15%, against China's 80 to 100% built up over decades of state-directed overbuilding ^[5]. New energy projects now wait 61 months for a grid connection, up from 36 in 2015 ^[6].

AI’s insatiable power demand is outpacing the grid’s decade-long development cycles, creating a critical bottleneck. — Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management

China's competing offer is built to need less of exactly what the U.S. cannot provide. DeepSeek and other open-weight models are free to download and run on far lighter infrastructure ^[7][8]. The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, launched as the inclusive alternative to U.S.-led governance, asks no partner to secure gigawatts or win a town's consent ^[9]. One model is shaped by a democracy's grid and its zoning boards; the other is designed to sidestep both. The partners Washington is courting are pricing in the difference in real time. Saudi Arabia accepted $1 billion in Nvidia Blackwell chips for its Humain project ^[10] — and, the same month, signed a pact with China's Shanghai Services Federation to co-develop open-source AI ecosystems ^[11].

Open source is the lifeblood of innovation, and AI is the core driver of transformation. — AbdulAziz AlOraij

Singapore has welcomed DeepSeek's low-cost models while insisting it will act in its own interests ^[12].

Singapore’s consistent approach is to act in a way that meets our own interests. — Josephine Teo

In late August 2026, when Huawei proposed building AI data centers in Egypt, the State Department scrambled to assemble Nvidia, AMD, and Microsoft into a counter-bid — after Huawei had already made its offer, and while U.S. export restrictions on chips to Egypt complicate the American pitch ^[13]. The fault line is one, not two. The same grid bottleneck and the same wall of local consent that has municipalities from Alabama to California enacting moratoriums and bans ^[14][15] is what makes the lighter, open-source, consent-free alternative attractive to the very partners the U.S. is courting. OpenAI paused its Stargate UK project over energy costs and regulatory uncertainty ^[16].

AI compute is foundational to that goal — we continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions, such as regulation and the cost of energy, enable long-term infrastructure investment. — OpenAI

The domestic buildout failure and the geopolitical competition are not two stories. They are the same crack, visible from two sides.