Stargate Argentina
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Stargate Argentina is an announced, early-stage plan to build a large artificial intelligence data center in Argentina, which its backers describe as the first site of OpenAI's Stargate Project in Latin America. It was unveiled on 10 October 2025 at the Casa Rosada, the seat of government in Buenos Aires, where President Javier Milei received an OpenAI delegation. Under a non-binding letter of intent, OpenAI and the Argentine energy developer Sur Energy said they would work toward a facility in Patagonia with a capacity of up to 500 megawatts (MW). The Argentine government and most press accounts put the potential investment at up to 25 billion US dollars over several years, a figure presented as planned and aspirational rather than committed. OpenAI stated that it would not put its own money into the project and would instead serve as the main buyer of computing capacity once the data center is built. Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, called it "our first Stargate project in Latin America."
The announcement was as much a political event as a construction plan, and its details have stayed thin. OpenAI's own statement avoided naming a dollar figure; the 25-billion number came mainly from the government and from reporting, and no binding contracts, financing, site selection, or permits were disclosed. As of June 2026, the project had not been formally submitted to the Argentine state or to its flagship investment-incentive regime, and both OpenAI and Sur Energy had gone quiet about it. That gap between a high-profile launch and the absence of any paperwork has made Stargate Argentina a frequently cited example of how the global AI buildout gets announced versus how it is actually financed and built.
| Item | Detail (announced or planned) |
|---|---|
| Project name | Stargate Argentina |
| Announced | 10 October 2025, Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires |
| Lead developer | Sur Energy, with an unnamed global cloud infrastructure partner |
| OpenAI's role | Buyer of computing capacity once built; not an investor |
| Planned capacity | Up to 500 MW |
| Reported investment | Up to US$25 billion over time (planned, not committed) |
| Location | Patagonia, Argentina (Neuquén, Río Negro or Chubut under study) |
| Energy | Wind, hydro and gas, plus a cool climate for cooling |
| Incentive regime | RIGI (Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones) |
| First phase | About 100 MW, targeted for 2027, with construction from 2026 |
| Program | OpenAI for Countries; first Stargate in Latin America |
| Status (June 2026) | Non-binding letter of intent; not yet submitted to the government or RIGI |
Stargate Argentina extends OpenAI's Stargate Project brand into a third region. The original Stargate was unveiled in the United States in January 2025 as a joint venture led by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle, with a stated ambition to invest up to 500 billion dollars in American AI infrastructure and to reach roughly 10 gigawatts of capacity; its flagship US site is the Abilene data center in Texas. In May 2025 the company launched Stargate UAE in Abu Dhabi as the first Stargate outside the United States, a 1 gigawatt cluster inside a larger 5 gigawatt campus. The Argentina plan was presented as the next step abroad and the first in Latin America, packaged with OpenAI's OpenAI for Countries program, an effort to help national governments build sovereign AI capacity on American technology.
The OpenAI delegation that met Milei was led by Chris Lehane, the company's chief global affairs officer, and the announcement was paired with talk of broad AI adoption inside Argentine government, administration and research institutions. OpenAI has said Argentina is one of its larger Latin American markets, with weekly ChatGPT use rising sharply over the prior year and concentrated among adults aged 18 to 34. The data center and the software-adoption push were framed as two halves of the same partnership, although only the adoption side involves OpenAI directly; the compute side is owned, financed and built by others, with OpenAI lined up as a future customer.
The counterparty on the letter of intent is Sur Energy, a young and deliberately low-profile company that describes itself as a developer of sustainable digital infrastructure focused on Latin America. It was founded by three entrepreneurs: Matías Travizano, a physicist and data-analytics entrepreneur who helped design the project and who died in a mountaineering accident in 2025, weeks before the launch; Emiliano Kargieman, who is also the founder and chief executive of the Nasdaq-listed Earth-imaging satellite company Satellogic; and Stan Chudnovsky, a US-based technology executive. Kargieman became the public face of the project after Travizano's death.
Sur Energy said it would build and operate the data center through a joint venture with an unnamed global cloud infrastructure provider, leaving the actual operator of the future facility undisclosed. The company's thin public footprint quickly drew scrutiny. Argentine outlets noted that Sur Energy had little corporate history, a sparse online presence, and, by mid-2026, only three posts on its LinkedIn page, all from the time of the announcement. Some reports went as far as to describe it as a "phantom company," a characterization the firm has not publicly rebutted. Kargieman, for his part, framed the plan in national terms, telling reporters that it represented "a historic opportunity for the country" and combined Argentina's renewable-energy potential with growing AI demand. He acknowledged that the project depended on the Milei government's investment incentives to be viable.
The headline numbers are a capacity of up to 500 MW and an investment of up to 25 billion dollars, both attached to the full build-out rather than to any committed first stage. Reporting described a phased plan in which construction would begin around 2026 and an initial portion of roughly 100 MW would come online in 2027, with the remainder added over time. If completed at 500 MW, the facility would be far larger than anything currently operating in the region; the largest existing Latin American data centers are measured in the tens of megawatts, and one widely cited comparison put the biggest, in São Paulo, at about 61 MW. A facility of this size would require very large volumes of AI accelerators such as NVIDIA graphics processors, and arranging the supply and financing of that AI chip hardware would be a major undertaking.
It is important to attribute the figures carefully. OpenAI's published statement did not name an investment amount at all; it spoke only of a letter of intent to explore a data center of up to 500 MW and of OpenAI's intent to purchase capacity. The 25-billion-dollar figure was supplied by the Argentine presidency and repeated by news agencies including Reuters. OpenAI separately made clear that it "will not be investing a single dollar" and that its commitment is to buy compute once the site exists. In other words, the capital, the financing and the construction risk all sit with Sur Energy and its undisclosed partner, and the dollar figure is a projection of what the whole program might eventually cost, not a sum that any party has pledged.
Patagonia was chosen for its energy and its climate. Southern Argentina has strong, steady winds, cool ambient temperatures that cut the cost of cooling a large data center, and access to several kinds of generation. The region sits near the Vaca Muerta shale formation, one of the world's larger unconventional gas and oil deposits, and it also has hydroelectric dams and a growing fleet of wind farms. At the announcement, Sur Energy said it was evaluating three Patagonian provinces, Neuquén, Río Negro and Chubut, without committing to a site. Reporting indicated that Sur Energy holds or is developing wind assets in Chubut and Río Negro, and that potential power partners included Central Puerto, the operator of the Piedra del Águila hydroelectric dam in Neuquén, and the renewables developer Genneia.
The same geography that makes Patagonia attractive also raises hard questions. A 500 MW load is comparable to a small nuclear plant, and delivering that much firm power in a sparsely populated region would require major new investment in generation and long-distance transmission. Argentine commentators and environmental groups have also raised concerns about water use, grid strain and the opacity of the plans, noting that none of the technical or environmental detail needed to assess the project had been made public.
The plan fits squarely into President Milei's economic program. A self-described libertarian who took office in December 2023, Milei has courted United States technology investors aggressively, meeting Altman during a visit to San Francisco and cultivating ties with Silicon Valley figures. Altman has publicly praised Milei's vision for AI in Argentina. The vehicle for large foreign projects is the RIGI, the Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones (Incentive Regime for Large Investments), created in 2024 as part of Milei's omnibus reform law. RIGI offers investors who commit at least 200 million dollars in foreign currency a reduced 15 percent income-tax rate, 30 years of tax and currency stability, exemptions from import and export duties, accelerated depreciation, and progressively free access to foreign exchange. Sur Energy has said the data center would be structured under RIGI.
The timing drew immediate attention. The announcement came on 10 October 2025, about two weeks before Argentina's 26 October 2025 midterm legislative elections, and critics framed it as a campaign-season showcase of foreign investment. By mid-2026 the Milei government was floating an expanded incentive, dubbed a "Super RIGI" in the press, aimed at "industries of the future" including AI and data centers, with a higher minimum investment threshold and explicit references to powering data centers with Vaca Muerta gas and southern cooling. Opposition figures voiced suspicion that such a regime was being tailored to specific technology companies, especially after high-profile Silicon Valley visits to the Casa Rosada, and warned about data privacy, surveillance and weak environmental safeguards.
The most striking feature of Stargate Argentina is how little has happened since the launch. Several months after the October 2025 announcement, the Argentine newspaper Perfil and the Buenos Aires Times reported that the project had never been formally presented to the government or entered into the RIGI pipeline. The Economy Ministry said there was no resolution on record to back the statement of intent, and Darío Clemente, a researcher at the RIGI Observatory run by the environmental group FARN, said flatly that "Stargate is not presented" and that the observatory did not even list it among announced projects because there were no concrete figures, dates or locations. Of roughly 40 RIGI projects being tracked, none was Stargate. Both OpenAI and Sur Energy declined to give updates, indicating that their communication had been tied to the announcement itself.
This has fed a broader debate over whether the project is a genuine investment or, as one Buenos Aires Times analysis put it, closer to political marketing. The case against treating Stargate Argentina as a done deal is straightforward: the letter of intent is non-binding, OpenAI has explicitly ruled out investing, the lead developer is an untested company with an opaque structure, the financing for a 25-billion-dollar build has not been demonstrated, no site has been chosen, and the headline capacity would dwarf anything in the region. The case for taking it seriously rests on the strength of the partners around it, OpenAI's real demand for compute, Argentina's genuine energy advantages, and the possibility that the plan could be revived inside a future "Super RIGI" framework. For now, Stargate Argentina is best understood as an announced intention rather than a project under construction, which sets it apart from the US Stargate sites and from Stargate UAE, where building is already under way.