At President Trump’s inauguration, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, was relegated to the overflow room while other tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg took prime spots on the dais under the Capitol rotunda.
But days earlier, before flying into Washington, Mr. Altman was on the phone with Mr. Trump, preparing an announcement that would outflank Mr. Musk and put Mr. Altman’s company at the center of the new administration’s agenda for artificial intelligence.
On the 25-minute call, Mr. Altman appealed to Mr. Trump’s love of a big story and of a big deal. Mr. Altman told the president-elect that the tech industry would achieve artificial general intelligence — the hypothetical moment when technology matches human intelligence — during the Trump administration, according to three people familiar with the call. And to get there before competitors from China, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank had completed a $100 billion deal to build data centers across the country.
The day after the inauguration, Mr. Altman stood behind Mr. Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House as Mr. Trump announced the deal, called Stargate, and described it as the “largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history.”
Stargate had been in the works for months, but Mr. Altman and his partners timed the announcement to allow Mr. Trump to take credit for it in his first days in office.
“We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President,” Mr. Altman said in front of a gathering of reporters.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, the billionaires of Silicon Valley have jockeyed to influence the new administration. None of them have been more successful than Mr. Musk, who backed the Trump campaign with more than $250 million of his own money and now apparently has the power to slash jobs and budgets across the federal government.
Mr. Trump’s election and Mr. Musk’s insider status with the new administration could have shut the door on Mr. Altman’s influence in Washington. Mr. Altman, 39, was a longtime Democratic donor and loud critic of Mr. Trump during his first term. What’s more, he was near the top of Mr. Musk’s enemies list. The two had once fought for control of OpenAI, and are still battling it out in court. Mr. Musk also created his own A.I. company to compete head on with Mr. Altman’s company.
That Mr. Altman managed to outflank Mr. Musk and make OpenAI the centerpiece of the new administration’s nascent A.I. agenda to stay ahead of China was a testament to Mr. Altman’s talent for shape shifting and nearly two decades of deal making in Silicon Valley. It also offered a view of Mr. Trump’s flexible loyalties when it comes to being wooed, as well as the limits of Mr. Musk’s ability to influence tech policy.
Even before the presidential election, Mr. Altman quietly worked his way into Mr. Trump’s inner circle, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Mr. Altman’s drive to win over Mr. Trump. Many of the details of that courtship, which went on for months, have never been reported before.
In a statement emailed to The New York Times, the OpenAI spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois said the company looked forward to working with President Trump to ensureA.I.’s “potential for driving economic growth and advancing scientific discovery that benefits as many people as possible.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Altman leaned on relationships with Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and Mr. Trump’s eventual nominee for interior secretary, and two other Trump allies: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the software company Oracle, and Masayoshi Son, founder of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.
During the Biden administration, Mr. Altman had become a familiar face in Washington, meeting with White House officials and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to guide A.I. regulations. He regularly communicated via a private text thread with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, according to a person familiar with the arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
As the 2024 election approached, Mr. Altman questioned President Biden’s ability to win. But he did donate to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign in 2023, as well as to many state Democratic Party organizations.
He also donated to Republican campaigns (but not to the Trump campaign) and regularly communicated with Republican lawmakers. And in private, OpenAI was hedging its bets. In early June, two OpenAI executives met with Mr. Trump in a hotel room in Las Vegas, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Altman was slated to attend the meeting, too, but bowed out after testing positive for Covid.
The meeting was arranged by Mr. Burgum. He had a yearslong relationship with OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, who was born in Thompson, N.D. Some OpenAI staffers call them the two most important tech people the state has ever produced.
During the meeting in Las Vegas, Mr. Brockman and OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, showed Mr. Trump the company’s A.I. video generator, Sora, which had not yet been released to the public, the two people said. With the technology, anyone can generate videos — like a herd of woolly mammoths trotting through a snowy meadow — simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen.
To build this kind of technology, they explained, companies like OpenAI needed massive computer data centers backed by enormous amounts of electrical power. They focused on language around construction and infrastructure, appealing to Mr. Trump’s real estate background, and said that these giant facilities would be essential as the United States raced with China to lead the development of A.I.
As he accepted the Republican nomination the following month, Mr. Trump trumpeted the importance of electrical power in the world of A.I. “A.I. needs tremendous — literally, twice the electricity that’s available now in our country, can you imagine?” he said.
But as Mr. Altman and other OpenAI executives worked to strengthen political connections, they were struggling to secure the $100 billion they needed for Stargate.
Mr. Altman’s greatest challenge has been the company’s dependence on investors. OpenAI raised over $13 billion from the Microsoft in return for an exclusive deal to purchase its computing power from the tech giant. But OpenAI wanted even more computing power.
In late 2023, as Mr. Altman was negotiating with Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, to build $100 billion in new data center infrastructure — a project that was already called “Stargate” — the OpenAI board of directors unexpectedly fired him. He was reinstated five days later, but Mr. Nadella was spooked and decided not to put in the money for Stargate. Mr. Altman needed another way to build Stargate, according to two people familiar with the Microsoft negotiations.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
Mr. Altman had been discussing possible investments with SoftBank and Mr. Son. The two men met at OpenAI’s offices earlier in the summer of 2024, according to three people familiar with their discussions. After Microsoft agreed to an exception in its exclusive contract with OpenAI, the start-up signed a $10 billion data center deal with Oracle and pushed for something much bigger.
As Oracle built a new data center campus in Abilene, Texas, Mr. Altman hoped to expand this into the $100 billion project he and Mr. Nadella had envisioned months earlier. But the Biden administration had expressed concern over OpenAI’s efforts to secure additional money from investors in the Middle East. And potential investors worried that the government would be slow to provide approvals for a project that required enormous amounts of land and electricity.
The sentiment surrounding the deal changed after Trump was elected. Over the next several weeks, SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI each agreed to put money into Stargate, said three people familiar with the negotiations. They also secured funding from MGX, a tech investment firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates.
As the inauguration approached, many of Mr. Altman’s A.I. rivals met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. This included Mr. Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg, who has been giving away Meta’s A.I. technology in an effort to devalue OpenAI’s technology.
The best Mr. Altman could do was a meeting in Palm Springs outside of Mar-a-Lago with Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
After donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, Mr. Altman was invited to the inaugural festivities. But a mutual acquaintance — it is not clear who — arranged Mr. Altman’s Friday afternoon phone call with the president-elect, according to four people familiar with the arrangements.
On Inauguration Day, Mr. Altman, Mr. Ellison and Mr. Son were at the Capitol Building ceremony but were largely overlooked by the public. Early the next day, they gathered in a suite of the five-star Riggs hotel in Washington to map out how they would unveil their partnership to the world, according to four people familiar with the meeting. As they nibbled on cold cuts and fruit, they tried to put the draft of a blog post on a screen hanging on the wall. At first, they couldn’t get the screen to work. Then Mr. Altman, the youngest of the three, got it working.
In the afternoon, the Stargate partners rode in a caravan to the White House and walked to the visitor’s entrance for a public event they’d agreed upon in that earlier phone call with Mr. Trump. But they were left waiting in the 10-degree chill for 10 to 20 minutes. On Mr. Trump’s second day in office, there were problems with the White House computer system. And Mr. Ellison had forgotten his driver’s license, according to three people familiar with the moment.
Eventually, Mr. Altman, Mr. Son, and Mr. Ellison followed Mr. Trump into the Roosevelt Room. In his opening remarks, Mr. Trump referred again to the electricity demands of data centers, which he described as “big, beautiful buildings that are going to employ a lot of people.”
He introduced Mr. Altman, who was wearing a gray suit, blue tie, and American flag pin on his lapel, as “by far the leading expert, based on everything I read.”
That night, in a pair of posts to X, Mr. Musk attacked the deal, insisting that Mr. Altman and his partners did not have the initial $100 billion for their project, let alone the $500 billion they promised to eventually invest in the future.
The next day, Mr. Altman took to X with new observations about the president.
“i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” he wrote.
The administration did not side with Mr. Musk. “The American people should take President Trump and those C.E.O.s’ words for it,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox News the same day. “These investments are coming to our great country, and American jobs are coming along with them.”
The president also demurred. “He hates one of the people,” Mr. Trump told reporters, in an apparent reference to Mr. Musk’s dislike for Mr. Altman. “But I have certain hatreds of people too.”
Less than a week later, U.S. financial markets unexpectedly tumbled after a Chinese start-up called DeepSeek unveiled powerful A.I. technology that was built with fewer specialized chips than many experts thought possible. Pundits were questioning whether Stargate was the right move.
Mr. Altman flew back to Washington and had dinner with Republican lawmakers two days later. The next morning, he spoke at a private event with members of Congress, policymakers and think tank leaders in the shadow of the Capitol, in a gleaming rented space close to the lobbying shops of Google and Amazon.
When Mr. Altman was asked what DeepSeek meant as he and his partners committed $100 billion to new data centers, Mr. Altman edited the question. “$500 billion,” he said. Then he answered it.
As companies like OpenAI continue to increase their computing resources, he said, their A.I. technologies continue to get better.
“We should want to keep doing that,” he said.
Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.