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Stargate was a 1994 science fiction film about travelers zooming through a wormhole to an alternate reality. It also seems an appropriate name for the mass artificial intelligence infrastructure project pledging to invest as much as $500 billion in the US over the next four years, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday night. Backed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, Stargate reflects an alternate reality created by the fusion of the AI superbubble and Trump’s re-election. Washington, it seems, is disappearing into its own wormhole.
“This monumental undertaking is a resounding statement of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” Trump said of the Stargate. Standing stiffly in their suits next to Trump in the White House, Larry Ellison, the 80-year-old co-founder of Oracle, Sam Altman, the boastfully ambitious CEO of OpenAI, and Masayoshi Son, the living chair of SoftBank, all beamed with satisfaction, like personifications of old technology, new technologies and global technologies.
“This is the beginning of a golden age,” Son said, echoing Trump’s remarks in his inaugural address. “We couldn’t do this without you, Mr. President,” cooed Altman. The prominent presence of several other tech billionaires at Trump’s inauguration also underscored how enthralled they are by the US president.
Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary blogger and champion of the Dark Enlightenment movement who has a cult following in some West Coast circles, claimed that democracy is over and called for a more authoritarian type of techno-monarchy. Trump’s “first friend” Elon Musk has already started calling himself Tesla’s technoking. But surrounded by his nerdy courtiers, it may be Trump who emerges as America’s technoking.
Trump has made it clear that he wants to reassert America’s hegemony in technology over China, particularly in AI. He has already abolished his predecessor Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence security. He also appears intent on deregulating cryptocurrencies and reversing the Biden administration’s antitrust agenda to give Big Tech even more freedom. Sensing profits and new opportunities in the defense, nuclear and space industries, America’s biggest tech companies rushed to applaud Trump’s moves.
These companies are already among the richest and most powerful in history, and they need a little help from Trump. Independent research firm Arete predicts that the five – Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft – will collectively increase their revenues to more than $2 trillion this year. Despite committing $300 billion in capital expenditures, Arete predicts it will continue to post profit margins and generate $430 billion in free cash flow.
However, three things can still prevent their dominance. The first is that competition is intensifying among the biggest tech companies themselves as they all bet on AI and try to disrupt the business models of others. “Big Tech can no longer achieve growth by staying in its tracks,” says Richard Kramer, founder of Areta. “We expect more The Hunger Games-style competition between Big Tech, attacking each other’s ‘core’ businesses, in consumer tech hardware, cloud services, content and e-commerce.”
That competition is also increasingly taking on a legal dimension as tech companies take on each other in court. Musk is suing OpenAI and Altman claiming that he and others were tricked into investing in the AI start-up because of its “bogus humanitarian mission”. He also broke down the Stargate announcement this week, posting on X: “They don’t really have any money.”
Microsoft testified against Google to break its search monopoly. As Matt Stoller, author of the Big Newsletter on monopoly power, has written, individuals, companies and states can initiate antitrust enforcement even if Washington holds back. “Antitrust is a set of laws designed to make business leaders fight each other,” Stoller wrote.
But some leading Silicon Valley venture capitalists, led by Marc Andreessen, have also warned of the dangers of big companies arming the government to crush start-ups and stifle innovation. They promoted the virtues of Little Techwhich they claim has always been “the vanguard of American technological supremacy”. Vice President JD Vance, a former VC investor, is in the past supported antitrust interventions to promote competition, opposing “this strange idea that something cannot be tyrannical if it comes through the operation of the free market”.
One of the biggest determinants of technology policy may simply be who has the most access to the technoking’s ear.
