New Zealand Investment Firm Morrison Ties to OpenAI's Stargate AI Infrastructure Project
New Zealand Investment Firm Morrison Ties to OpenAI's Stargate AI Infrastructure Project
New Zealand's Morrison, the parent company of Infratil, has quietly become a pivotal player in one of the most ambitious artificial intelligence infrastructure projects in the world: OpenAI's Project Stargate. The investment firm has made a US$1 billion investment in FiberLight, a Texas-based underground fiber cable company, which now plays a crucial role in supporting Stargate's massive data infrastructure needs.
According to Robert Huang, Morrison's executive director, FiberLight provides the backbone network that powers the Stargate initiative. With 32,000 kilometers of underground cabling in Virginia and Texas—key regions for data center clusters—FiberLight's infrastructure is essential for building the compute power needed to train AI models like ChatGPT, which require enormous computational resources.
“If you were to replace that network, conduit by conduit, strand by strand, it would probably cost you about US$3 billion today,” Huang noted during an interview with Markets with Madison in New York. “We’re really excited to be a part of all of that.”
Project Stargate, a US$500 billion initiative launched this year by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, aims to build the critical infrastructure required to support the next generation of AI models. The first phase of the project is already underway in Abilene, Texas, a region that has become a hub for AI and data center development.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced his company's own plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in AI infrastructure, highlighting the growing competition in the AI space. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are currently leading the charge, and the race for AI dominance is intensifying.
Huang expressed optimism about the future of AI infrastructure investment, stating, “My hope is that the trend will continue for at least five years.” Morrison’s growing presence in the AI infrastructure space suggests that the firm sees long-term value in supporting the backbone of AI development.
As the global demand for AI compute power continues to rise, firms like Morrison are positioning themselves at the forefront of this technological revolution. Whether this marks a strategic move or a late entry into the AI infrastructure space remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: the future of AI is being shaped by the networks and infrastructure that power it.
