What’s Up With Microsoft’s Stargate?
Should we take Microsoft's rumored $115 billion plan to build a supercomputer seriously?
This year, April Fool’s Day came with the news that Microsoft and OpenAI had joined forces to build a $115 billion data center.
The name for this outlandish endeavor was “Project Stargate.”
I remember thinking to myself:
What an original branding initiative!
I wonder if it was Microsoft Copilot, or ChatGPT (OpenAI) that came up with that name.
I’ve always been fascinated by Egyptian mythology and culture, so I’m a big fan of Stargate SG-1, the television adaptation derived from the sci-fi feature film Stargate (1994).
The series follows a team of military and scientists in a top-secret project of the United States Air Force that uses an extraterrestrial device (Stargate) to move to other planets almost instantaneously.
At first, I thought this was nothing but a prank, but as the days passed, I kept reading more and more about Project Stargate.
Any analogy between the original Stargate and an AI-focused supercomputer with millions of GPUs sounds farfetched, but Stargate does have a nice ring to it and reminds me of another…
