One project Stargate please. That’ll be $500 Billion, sir. Would you like a bag with that?

Let's start this rant with the dramatic Stargate series theme music…….but todays article is where the sci-fi ends and the sobering reality begins. OpenAI’s Project Stargate is unfortunately not about intergalactic wormholes or fighting parasitic invaders (though, honestly, it might as well be, just ask Willow). No, this is a $500 billion mega-project which is our latest gamble on Artificial General Intelligence and beyond. This is not so much about “saving the galaxy” but more “building god-like thinking machines and hoping they don’t turn us into Oompa Loompa like serfs, shoveling coal into the machines furnaces".

So, what is the thing with this project?

Last week, OpenAI announced their Icarian grand vision. And that encompasses AI mega-factories that are going to be sprawling across the U.S., starting with a Texas facility. This one is priced at a cool $100 billion.

You read that right my smart friend.

One hundred billion dollars, just to kick things off.

And for what?

To create infrastructure so that AI can “think” faster, deeper, and longer than humans ever could. You can’t compare this to the Apollo Program. Better is to compare it with the next Manhattan Project, and instead of nukes, they are going to build “sentient” algorithms that solve cancer or crash the stock market before lunch.

Let’s dig into this financial black hole, shall we?

More rants after the commercial brake:

1. Comment, or share the article; that will really help spread the word 🙌

2. Connect with me on Linkedin 🙏

3. Subscribe to TechTonic Shifts to get your daily dose of tech 📰

4. TechTonic Shifts has a new blog, full of slop, I know you will like !

From fiction to frightening reality

The name Stargate, to me, conjures up images of brave human teams stepping through shimmering portals to explore new worlds, but this version is far darker. Remember when Google’s Willow “glimpsed” another universe with its quantum AI experiments? Well, OpenAI’s Stargate isn’t messing with alternate dimensions yet. But it is pouring half a trillion dollars into transforming the U.S. into the AI capital of the world. Because the only thing scarier than AGI is not being the first to create it.

With Stargate, they are promising us massive AI hubs across the nation. Their partners in crime are SoftBank, Nvidia, Oracle, Microsoft, and a handful of other financial backers like Sheikh Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al Nahyan (just checking if everything is spelled correct…yes, continue) who is pouring in a mere 7 Billion.

7 Billion?

Ha !

That is pauper money.

Luckily the tax payers won’t have to cough it up this time.

Well, they do, when the bubble bursts, but that’s a whole different story altogether.

As I mentioned earlier, their goal is to create Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI for short. For the uninitiated (that’s only a handful of TTS readers, excluding you, my friend), that’s the moment AI stops being an overachieving autocorrect and starts thinking like a human, or better yet, beyond human. And the fun is that whoever gets there first pretty much wins the world.

But don’t worry.

OpenAI assures us this is all in the name of progress, economic growth, and national security.

National security?

Nothing ominous about that.

Right?

An investment or humanity’s final moment

Let’s put that half-trillion-dollar price tag in a bit of perspective. The Apollo Program cost $153 billion, if I adjust it for inflation (well, Claude gets the credits for this one). The Manhattan Project? Uhm, a modest $30 billion. But Stargate dwarfs them all because AI is not a new frontier…it is the frontier. The stakes are not about reaching the moon or splitting the atom.

They are about who controls intelligence.

Sam “the scam” Altman, calls compute power the bottleneck which is holding AI back. In plain terms, he is saying that AI is a hyper-genius which is trapped in a tiny body. Stargate will give it the massive supercomputing power it needs to “think” its way out, and straight into unprecedented territory like AGI and Super Intelligence. Whether that’s curing diseases, solving climate change, or triggering an AI arms race, well, that’s up for another debate.

But hey, at least Texas gets some new jobs out of it.

That’s nice

Right?

Josh Shaner, Raegan Hill, Selina Parker ?

The usual suspects assemble

Stargate is no solo mission of OpenAI. They have assembled a who’s-who of Big Tech to pull this one off. Nvidia’s of course will cramp in its GPUs to fuel AI’s insatiable appetite for computer processing power. Oracle and ARM do their data management thingy and semiconductor schtuff. Microsoft, is still clinging to its Azure partnership, gets first choice on capacity deals, and SoftBank, because what’s a moonshot without Masayoshi Son throwing money at it, chairs the entire operation.

Why so many cooks in the kitchen?

That’s of course a tactical diversification strategy.

OpenAI wants to reduce its dependence on any one partner, especially Microsoft, which historically held OpenAI’s intellectual property rights until AGI is achieved (that is the deal they made). Now, it’s a free-for-all, and competition is supposed to keep things ethical.

Pause for laughter….

Here’s the existential reality....Stargate is obviously not about shiny new data centers. It’s about global dominance. China aims to become the AI superpower by 2030, and Stargate is America’s answer to that looming threat. Whoever gets to AGI first could control global economies, win wars without firing a single shot, and solve scientific problems decades ahead of everyone else.

Of course, there’s the tiny detail of AGI possibly evolving into Artificial Superintelligence, which would surpass human intelligence entirely. At that point, we are not only outsmarted....we are obsolete. But don’t worry, folks, OpenAI has promised to “align AI with human values”.

Hahahahahaha

Ethical schmethical, Sam "the scam".

China’s long march gate

And China of course doesn’t want to be left behind, so I could imagine China creating something similar to OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate mega-project but stripped down, discounted, and manufactured with the relentless efficiency of a Chinese assembly line, powered by the much hailed DeepSeek.

Let’s call their answer “The Long March Gate” ok? And that would be China’s hypothetical answer to Stargate. If the U.S. wants to spend half a trillion dollars to show its AI muscles, you can bet China is eyeing a cheaper, faster, and potentially shadier route to AGI dominance.

After all, why pay designer prices when you can buy your schtuff at Temu?

China’s secret weapon in this imaginary AI arms race is of course DeepSeek. OpenAI’s GPT-4 came at a cost that makes your wallet cry, and DeepSeek was developed at unbelievably 30 to 50 times cheaper. Yes, you read that right.

Thirty to fifty.

DeepSeek is the Costco of large language models.

Ok, we won’t know the real truth about how they managed to slash costs so dramatically, some say it’s due to their novel architectural approach, like reinforcement learning, a more efficient use of hardware (I can even run it on my own laptop with limited GPU), and they have created a method to only use parts of their neural net, which means that only a fraction - about 5% of their network - is active at anygiven time.

And that saves a mountain of cash.

Others say that it is because a group which was linked to DeepSeek gained unauthorized access to OpenAI data, managed to reverse engineer their model, and used ChatGPT to train DeepSeek by something called model extraction.

So, what would it cost for China to build their own Stargate with DeepSeek’s budget-friendly brainpower? Let’s ask Claude (Sonnet) to do some number crunching. If OpenAI’s Stargate is estimated at $500 billion, using DeepSeek instead would slash that cost down to somewhere between $10 billion and $17 billion.

For reference, that’s about the price of a few shiny Chinese bullet trains or, you know, three months of TikTok’s global ad revenue.

But let’s be real.

This thing is not about cost alone.

It is about ambition.

China’s Long March Gate would likely have fewer ethical debates, no pesky oversight committees, and of course a production timeline that will be so aggressive that it might finish before Texas even breaks ground (Texas being the place where it all will take off). After all, when you cut out the bureaucracy and sprinkle in some state-sponsored efficiency, you can afford to undercut the competition.

And this is exactly the reason why Trump axed Executive Order 14110, titled "Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence", signed by Biden in 2023.

I can easily imagine the Big Tech oligarchs gathered around the table with President Trump, making it clear that slashing regulations was the price for their promised half-trillion-dollar investment in the economy. He likely signed away the last remaining safeguard without any hesitation, not even pausing to consider the consequences.

Would The Long March Gate achieve AGI faster than Stargate?

Maybe.

Would it align with human values?

Absolutely not.

But who needs alignment when you’ve got a 50% off sale on artificial superintelligence.

Is Stargate a job guillotine?

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure as hell finds new ways to kick us between the….

Ok, let me tell you a short story.

Once upon a time, automation kicked factory workers out of their jobs. The machines arrived, and they were faster and stronger than any worker who ever lived. The workers who had spent decades perfecting their craft found themselves watching cold metal arms do in minutes what once took them hours. They were told to “retrain” and “adapt”, as if decades of experience could be swapped out like an old conveyor belt.

Some of the workers found work in warehouses, where they were feeding the very machines that had replaced them, while others drifted into gig work, where they had to trade steady wages for scraps.

Now, AI is here to do the same, but this time, it is going for anyone who ever touched a spreadsheet, typed an email, or scheduled a meeting. If your job requires a keyboard instead of a jackhammer, congratulations, you are now first in line for redundancy.

OpenAI’s Stargate is the biggest AI project in history, AND it is going to be the impetus for the largest mass layoff system ever devised. It’s a half-trillion-dollar farewell card to the American and European workforce, and it’s signed by Silicon Valley, co-signed by President Trump, and rubber-stamped by every profit hungry CEO who has ever had a dark fantasy about firing an entire department without having to hear them cry.

Want to know more about this doomsday scenario?

Read:

(2) Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn

(2) The end is nigh for your career. Yes, yours! | LinkedIn

(2) The book of prophecies - AI 2025 edition | LinkedIn

The Big Tech club promises us all technological supremacy with Stargate, economic growth, and a reindustrialized America. The reality, however, will be a horde of jobless workers who are watching their livelihoods get swallowed by algorithms that don’t take sick days, don’t unionize, and don’t whine about work-life balance.

The numbers don’t lie, people, even if the PR spin does.

Artificial General Intelligence (that is the holy grail of machine learning) could be operational by 2025, if you believe Sam’s words (who more than once walked back his statements). We will also see agentic AI creeping into workflows, and replacing anyone who makes a living typing words, or scheduling meetings, or making phone calls (read WEF’s Future of Work report). There are 18.5 million administrative workers in the U.S., and those jobs are going to disappear faster than a European LinkedIn post calling for AI regulation.

And those aren’t just some silly numbers. Those are real people.

I am talking about singles, parents, caregivers, and middle-class workers who didn’t sign up to compete with a silicon competitor. But wait, they tell us, Stargate is creating jobs too! Sure….a 100,000 of them, and according to uncle Bill, mostly for software engineers and AI specialists.

Because when you’ve spent twenty years organizing spreadsheets, retraining as a machine learning scientist is definitely a realistic career pivot.

If you think this is not that urgent, and it will take a few years to sink in… just read this article:

(4) Klarna’s CEO bragged about AI replacing workers is now sweating bullets because AI will replace his too | LinkedIn - it’s about the CEO of Klarna, who’s name I can never pronounce right. He sacked 20% of his overall staff in just over a year. And this year he is heading for a further reduction of nearly half of its remaining workforce, which will ultimately leave only one third of the original staff.

This is not a restructuring, people. This is a corporate bloodbath! And if that sounds bleak, congratulations, you’re paying attention. Because what’s coming is a social collapse in slow motion.

AI isn’t another tool for the workforce.

Read my virtual lips: AI-does-not-assist-workers.

It replaces them.

And for those of us who still clinging to employment, this is not an upgrade, it is an extraction.

You will become a trainer, like the remaining staff at Klarna. You will be feeding the machine that will soon take your job. It’s the economic equivalent of digging your own grave, with the only difference being KPIs and performance reviews before the infamous pink slip arrives.

And yet, the outrage is missing.

Is it because we have been complacent for too long?

Or is it because we have come to see AI is this mesmerizing play toy to help us create memes of ourselves, and to help us pretend to be something we are not. Big Tech have already written their press releases, and are flooding the internet with enough corporate slime to convince people that being replaced is just another step toward innovation.

But hold on!

Don’t stop reading now!!

Because there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

And, no, it’s not the light you see just before you die.

Let me explain.

China’s light at the end of the tunnel

Thanks to Deepseek, the AI gold rush just hit a wall, and ironically, it’s the Chinese wall.

Wall Street was once frothing at the mouth over the promise of a trillion-dollar AI dominance, but they have suddenly come to realize that they’ve been financing an overpriced demolition crew for their own industries.

And now, because of a tiny startup called Deepseek, the AI industry has hit the brakes hard. The financial markets got scared, and Nvidia just lost $500 billion market cap, and venture capital firms are hitting the panic button left and right, and OpenAI’s humongous baby project Stargate isn’t looking like the next Apollo mission anymore, but more like a massively overpriced disaster.

I think that it is almost poetic.

Big Tech was all set to replace millions of jobs, automate away the middle class, and claim their seats at the top of an AI-powered oligarchy, except they forgot one tiny detail...

Investors actually expect this stuff to make money.

Turns out, when someone builds a version of ChatGPT for pennies on the dollar somewhere where Big Tech cannot control the outcome (i.e. China), the trillion-dollar hype train starts looking an awful lot like a Ponzi scheme.

And let’s talk about that little layoff apocalypse that we were all bracing for.

The plan was simple.

AI would become so wildly profitable that companies wouldn’t think twice before axing millions of human workers in favor of soulless, digital reps. But that only works if AI is a limitless gold mine, not an over-leveraged science experiment which is bleeding cash at Silicon Valley rates.

And now that investors are suddenly rethinking their AI addiction, shareholder value horny CEO’s aren’t exactly rushing to fire the people who actually keep the lights on. OpenAI and its buddies can talk all they want about agentic AI, you know, the kind that replaces anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection, but when the entire financial ecosystem propping up these models starts crumbling, the Great Corporate Purge isn’t so inevitable anymore.

So, right now, the tech giants are too busy doing damage control to bother pulling the trigger on mass layoffs.

So, is this the part where we all sigh in relief?

Not quite.

AI isn’t dead you know.

It has just been mugged by a Chinese gang in broad daylight.

A few bruises here and there and it will get back on it’s feet.

Stargate will still be built, because no politician ever backed down from a $500 billion monument to their own ego. And Big Tech will still do everything in its power to automate humanity out of the equation. But at least, for now, the workforce just got a stay of execution.

Big Tech is so focused on replacing humans, but they are all forgetting the golden rule of capitalism…. you can’t replace consumers and expect them to keep buying your products.

Call it poetic justice.

Call it economic karma.

Either way, the AI reckoning just got a lot messier, and for once, the blood on the floor isn’t ours.

Signing— yeah whatever,had enough of this depressing shit.

Marco

Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️

Think a friend would enjoy this too? Share the newsletter and let them join the conversation. Google appreciates your likes by making my articles available to more readers.

To keep you doomscrolling 👇

1. Brace, brace brace! AI takes the stick at Heathrow’s air traffic control center | LinkedIn

2. AI is a compulsive liar | LinkedIn

3. In 2025, AI needs to put up or just shut up! | LinkedIn

4. A 17 yo brat created a $1M/month app. Here’s how he did it. | LinkedIn

5. This is a eulogy for chegg. Gone but not forgotten (unless you’re a student, then definitely otten) | LinkedIn

6. Musk wants to make games great again | LinkedIn

7. The great tech wake-up call: Developers, meet the dystopia you helped build | LinkedIn

8. Flamethrower dogs, kamikaze cars, and bomb-planting humanoids. | LinkedIn

9. Objection! Your honor, ChatGPT made me do it | LinkedIn

10. A cautionary tale about an AI unicorn that turns into a fraudulent little pwny | LinkedIn

11. Meet Daisy, the AI Granny who’s here to waste scammers’ lives | LinkedIn

12. AI Search Engine Optimization | LinkedIn

13. I’ve seen the dark side of AI, and you need to know about it | LinkedIn