L-R: Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Reuters
Some of the biggest names in tech clashed after the president Donald Trump unveiled its $500 billion private investment project in artificial intelligence.
Earlier this week Trump announced a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank invest billions of dollars in increasing domestic computing capacity to boost the development of artificial intelligence in the United States.
The project, called Stargate, was presented on The white house Trump, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The son will be the president of Stargate, while the semiconductor company Hand, Microsoft, NvidiaOracle and OpenAI will serve as key initial technology partners.
Executives have pledged to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years.
He struck the first blow Elon Musk — a close Trump ally and himself a key figure in artificial intelligence with his startup xAI — who claimed in a post on its social media platform X that the companies involved in the project “actually don’t have the money” to finance the investment.
“SoftBank has well under $10 billion secured. I have that from good sources,” Musk added in a subsequent post.
Musk chairs the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the White House’s main government efficiency effort. He was Trump’s biggest financial backer in the 2024 election.
A possible rift between Microsoft and OpenAI
On Wednesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff suggested the investment plan could create tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft, which are close partners.
On Tuesday, OpenAI said it did ended the contract with Microsoft to serve as its exclusive cloud service provider. The change in relationship was announced as part of the announcement of the Stargate project.
“I think it’s extremely important that OpenAI gets to other platforms quickly because Microsoft is building its own artificial intelligence,” Benioff told CNBC. “I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future, they will have their own frontier models.”
“They clearly said that it was too expensive and too difficult for them and that they wanted to have their own,” added the head of Salesforce. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleyman [as Microsoft AI CEO] — and Mustafa Suleyman and Sam Altman are not the best of friends.”
Microsoft named Suleyman, co-founder, last year Google’s AI laboratory DeepMind, do lead his new AI department.
Microsoft is the largest single investor in OpenAI, pouring billions of dollars into the company. It also offers OpenAI models on its Azure cloud platform as part of a commercial deal between the two companies.
‘I’m good for my 80 billion dollars’
CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella addressed concerns about the tech giant’s relationship with OpenAI on Wednesday, saying the two continued to share a “critical partnership.”
“Alone [Altman] he wants to continue with the laws of scaling to build more computers so he can train more models,” Nadella told CNBC. “We have the right of first refusal. He comes to us first. If we satisfy those needs, then we clean it. If not, he can go to these other providers.”
Asked about Musk’s claim that OpenAI and other companies involved in Stargate don’t have the funds to cover the initial $100 billion, Nadella said, “Look, all I know is that I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Microsoft announced in early 2025 that it plans to spend $80 billion this year building data centers to fuel its AI efforts.
“I’m going to spend $80 billion building Azure,” Nadella told CNBC. “Customers can count on Microsoft.”
– CNBC’s Eamon Javers and Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report
