
While the awesome $500-billion Stargate AI project will trigger extraordinary breakthroughs in everything from cancer research to supply chains to cybersecurity, the biggest triumph that will emerge from Stargate will be a widespread re-imagining of what’s possible versus what’s impossible.
And that’s where Oracle chairman Larry Ellison’s deep engagement is indispensable for this venture of utterly unprecedented scale — quick, name all the new companies that have been bankrolled to the tune of $500 billion. Pretty short list, isn’t it?
In literal terms, most of that $500 billion will go toward building 20 or more gigantic data centers jammed with some of the world’s most advanced technology strung together in ways to generate computing power of an almost unimaginable scale.
“Each building is a half a million square feet,” Ellison said at last week’s remarkable announcement at the White House flanked by President Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son.
“There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 in other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first.”
About 8 months ago, Ellison created the term “AI data centers” when he discussed publicly for the first time Oracle’s intentions to build the world’s largest data centers. At the same time, Ellison also emphasized that Oracle technology would also enable it to offer extremely small complete-cloud data centers. It was Ellison who first explored the possibility of constructing data centers at the very different limits of imagination: from the largest to the smallest.
And at Oracle CloudWorld a few months ago, he told an audience of financial analysts that the entry fee for getting into this new world of ultra-large and incredibly complex AI data centers — so vast and power-hungry that nuclear-reactor dynamos adjacent to them will be commonplace — is about $100 billion.
Indeed, that’s the size of the first tranch of funding for Stargate, per this OpenAI blog post:
“The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
Big dreams, right? And why shouldn’t they be?
For too long, we have been conditioned to scale down our dreams, to settle, to adapt, and to simply accept that some things are just impossible — so why bother? Why try?
But look at what Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son said during that dazzling press conference last week at the White House: “This is not just for business. As Larry said, this will help people’s lives. This will help solving many, many issues, difficult things that otherwise we could not have solved with the power of AI.
“I think AGI [artificial general intelligence] is coming very, very soon. But that’s not the goal — after that, artificial superintelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never, ever have thought that we could solve,” Son said.
“Well, this is the beginning of our golden age.”
At that announcement, Ellison immediately brought up another big dream, one that’s become his top prioritiy: modernized AI-powered healthcare systems and capabilities across the globe.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us, for every American,” Ellison said.
“To give you an idea of the types of applications that we’re building, the one that I think touches us all is electronic health records. Not just maintaining electronic health records, but looking at electronic health records, and helping doctors get a better understanding of the condition of their patients, and being able to provide healthcare plans that are much better than they otherwise would be,” he said.
“So a doctor in the Indian River Reservation would be able to see how a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering would treat the patient, or a doctor at Stanford would treat the patient. We actually provide all of that information, all of that guidance to the doctors who are treating cancer patients or patients with any other kind of disease — and it’s all made possible by AI.”

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As it turns out, that was merely a coming attraction for the big act: curing cancer.
When President Trump asked OpenAI CEO Altman to describe how AI can help fight cancer and other diseases, Altman replied, “I believe that as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate. We will be amazed at how quickly we’re curing this cancer and that one, and heart disease.
“What [Stargate] will do for the ability to deliver very high-quality healthcare and costs, but really to cure the diseases at a rapid, rapid rate, I think will be among the most important things this technology does,” Altman said.
And that’s the point at which Ellison took a sledgehammer to the idea that some problems are just too hard and some challenges are just too complex, so why bother?
With his excitement clearly showing through, Ellison spoke not about the wonders of AI technology but rather about the possibility to use that power to improve lives across the globe in ways we have never, ever imagined.
“One of the most exciting things we’re working on — again, using the tools that Sam and Masa are providing — is a cancer vaccine,” Ellison said
By the way — ever heard that term “cancer vaccine” before? Not cancer research or cancer detection or cancer treatment, but cancer vaccine.
Welcome to the Golden Age, when more and more of us will stop bending the knee to the tyranny of “impossible” and will instead use the extraordinary combination of human ingenuity plus AI to reset the limits of what is possible.
Back to Ellison: “It’s very interesting. With all of our cancers and cancer tumors, little fragments of those tumors float around in your blood. So you can do early cancer detection. And using AI, you can do early cancer detection with a blood test. And using AI to look at the blood test, you can find the cancers that are actually seriously threatening the person.
“So cancer diagnosis using AI has the promise of just being a simple blood test. Then beyond that, once we gene-sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person–we can design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that specific cancer,” Ellison said.
But wait a minute, wait a minute! Creating vaccines takes a long, long time, doesn’t it? So the patients could well be dead before their personalized cancer vaccine can be generated and given to them, right?
Well, that might have been the case in the past but it’s not going to be the case any longer after highly advanced AI of the type Stargate will help create and nurture comes to pass, as Ellison eagerly went on to explain.
“You can make that vaccine — that mRNA vaccine — robotically, again using AI — in about 48 hours,” Ellison said.
“So imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you, and having that vaccine available in 48 hours.
“This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future,” Ellison said.
Why Ellison, and Why Now
Beyond the points raised so far, why do I believe Larry Ellison will be the primary catalyst for helping human beings, here in the AI Era, reframe our sense of what’s possible and impossible?
Well, while it is certainly a subjective view, it’s also one backed by a lifetime of breakthrough achievements by Ellison and fully reflective of what he has done and how he operates.
In 2009, as the computer-hardware business was being turned upside-down and a wicked shakeout was obliterating what had been very successful companies, Ellison took his software company full-speed into hardware with the acquisition of Sun. The deal gave Oracle the foundation for its current high-growth success and potential.
In the America’s Cup competition 10 years ago, Ellison and his team conceived of the giant fixed-wing trimaran, a concept no one else had ever pursued let alone mastered as Team USA won the Cup.
Several years ago, Ellison decided to go head-on in the cloud infrastructure business against three of the world’s largest and wealthiest and most-influential companies: Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. While many called him crazy and/or suicidal, Ellison prevailed by changing the rules of the game, deploying highly advanced technology, and redefining what the modern cloud is and would become. And in the past few years, Oracle’s become the fourth hyperscaler with a cloud-infrastructure business growing in excess of 50%.
A few years ago, Oracle decided to modernize and automate the entire healthcare industry, not just slivers of it. It is, I believe, the most ambitious and wide-ranging industry transformation ever undertaken — and the value to Stargate of what Oracle and Ellison have learned in that effort over the past few years is incalculable.
In the past two years, Ellison has convinced its three hyperscaler competitors — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — to offer the Oracle Database within their clouds despite the fact that each of those three companies offer databases of their own. It has been wildly successful for Oracle — and for the other three companies as well.
While the other three hyperscalers continued to build a small number of very large data centers, Ellison steered Oracle in a totally different direction: build a very large number of relatively small data centers, while simultaneously exploring the far limits of data-center cosmology by designing and building remarkably vast and powerful “AI data centers.”
Final Thought
Ellison sees possibilities that few others see, and he never subscribes to conventional wisdom (which may always be conventional but is rarely if ever wise). Look at his comments about the possibility of a cancer vaccine that can be developed in 48 hours — he’s talking like a world-renowned oncologist, not one of the world’s foremost technologists.
With Altman and Son and Stargate’s other partners — particularly NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang —Ellison’s unmatched vision and ambition will ensure the entire team is at the center of what will become a global movement to dramatically redraw the lines around what’s possible versus what’s not.
As President Trump said of Ellison at that announcement, “These are highly respected guys. I was shocked with Larry being here because I don’t even think Larry does this stuff. And he did a very good job for a guy that doesn’t do it much, right?
“But he’s so respected, and the group – and it’s really an honor,” Trump said.
“But for Larry to be here and do this is very unusual because he doesn’t do this stuff. He doesn’t need to do it.”
No, Ellison surely doesn’t need to do it.
But what’s even more important is that he very clearly wants to do it.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis