OpenAI has laid out plans for five new U.S. data centers to bring its Stargate AI infrastructure project to a total of 7 gigawatts of capacity within three years. The company says that puts OpenAI on track to formalize its $500 billion, 10-gigawatt plans for Stargate by the end of 2025, ahead of schedule. The disclosure follows media coverage critical of OpenAI for moving too slowly toward its goals. There is also a SoftBank-imposed deadline of January 1 to corporately restructure in a way that allows investors to more fully participate in profits or risk losing $20 billion in funding.

In a news post, OpenAI says three new sites — in Shackelford County, Texas, Doña Ana County, New Mexico and an undisclosed Midwest location — will be built with Oracle, and two will be constructed with SoftBank. Of the latter, one in Lordstown, Ohio, has already broken ground. The second is being developed through SoftBank’s SB Energy in Milam County, Texas.

The three new Oracle facilities along with Stargate’s inaugural Abilene, Texas build with Oracle, will be able to deliver “over 5.5 gigawatts of capacity” if a 600-watt upgrade near Abilene is completed, OpenAI explains, adding that the SoftBank plants will have the potential to “scale to 1.5 gigawatts over the next 18 months.”

Combined with additional power from partners including Microsoft and CoreWeave — and any other deals that may come up in Q4 — OpenAI expects to have its planned 10 gigawatts accounted for by the end of the year.

Oracle began delivering the Nvidia GB racks to Abilene in June and the center “is already up and running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” and has “started early training and inference workloads” for OpenAI’s next-generation research, according to the company.

OpenAI says the SoftBank Ohio location is “on track to be operational next year” and describes the renewables-focused SB Energy as “providing powered infrastructure for a fast-build data center.”

Corporate restructuring is also on a fast track. On September 12, Business Today wrote that OpenAI reached a non-binding agreement with its principal investor, Microsoft, to restructure its for-profit division into a public benefit corporation (PBC), “a move that could pave the way for the AI startup to raise new funding and eventually go public.” The plan must be approved by approved by regulators in California and Delaware.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes AI will ultimately prove lucrative and sees infrastructure as integral to making it so. “We will push on infrastructure as hard as we can because that is what will drive our ability to deliver amazing technology and basic products and services,” Bloomberg quotes Altman saying at an Abilene press conference this week.

CNBC writes that “over $2 trillion in AI infrastructure has been planned around the world, according to an HSBC estimate.”

Wired reports that OpenAI has officially adopted Stargate as the brand name for all of its data center projects, “except those developed in partnership with Microsoft.”

“Since May, OpenAI has also announced Stargate UK and Stargate UAE,” writes Wired, noting that those deals have been championed by the Trump administration, which feels such ventures will “help American companies capture market share globally.”