The world's attention is on the "Stargate," the biggest question: Where does the 500 billion come from?

Elon Musk and Anthropic CEO pour cold water on "Stargate": Can it really secure $500 billion?

Overnight, boosted by the "Stargate" project, stock prices of investors and related industry chains in the U.S. rose across the board, with Nvidia and Microsoft up over 4%, Oracle up 6.75%, and SoftBank's U.S. stock rising about 11%.

As the first major deployment of the AI industry after Trump took office, the importance of "Stargate" is self-evident, with an expected investment scale of up to $500 billion. However, the project's high costs and feasibility have sparked considerable controversy. Musk directly "sang a different tune," retorting against Altman, and then the CEO of Anthropic also came out to "pour cold water".

Musk believes that the companies participating in "Stargate" cannot actually come up with that much funding, stating that SoftBank can directly provide less than $10 billion in assets. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also thinks the project is "a bit chaotic," indicating that "it is still unclear how much actual funding is involved and how much has been committed," and it is also unclear how the Trump administration will participate in the project.

Gavin Baker: $500 billion is absurd

Famous TMT investor Gavin Baker also believes that $500 billion is an "absurd number," unless SoftBank chooses to sell all its Alibaba and Arm stocks.

Gavin further pointed out:

SoftBank has $38 billion in cash, $142 billion in debt, and generates about $3 billion in free cash flow (FCF) annually; the equity values of Arm and Alibaba are $143 billion and $18 billion, respectively;

Oracle has $11 billion in cash, $88 billion in debt, and generates $10 billion in FCF annually; OpenAI is still burning cash; as a $100 billion fund, in the best-case scenario, MGX might allocate 10% of the fund to this project.

The first $100 billion comes from financing?

Wall Street Journal previously mentioned that the initial funding for the "Stargate" project is $100 billion, with plans to increase the investment scale to $500 billion over the next four years.

According to the Financial Times, insiders have indicated that the founding investors of Stargate—SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and the Abu Dhabi Sovereign AI Fund (MGX)—will invest some of their own funds into the company, but a significant portion of the initial $100 billion investment is expected to come from new investors whose identities have yet to be determined.Another relevant person stated that the funds will consist of equity from founding partners and co-investors, as well as debt, and indicated that the funds will be deployed immediately.

There are speculations that OpenAI's strategic partner Microsoft may sponsor the funding. According to informed sources, Nadella and Altman have had multiple discussions regarding the latter's plans for a major expansion of computing power, and Microsoft may invest in OpenAI's infrastructure projects in the future, including the "Stargate" project.

However, during an interview on Wednesday, Microsoft's CEO Nadella "politely" opposed this notion, stating that Microsoft has an $80 billion capital expenditure budget this year, but it is unrelated to "Stargate":

"All I know is that my $80 billion is not an issue."

Media reports suggest that the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI may have deteriorated, with Microsoft being less willing to continue "pouring money" into OpenAI.

It was reported that in OpenAI's recent $6.6 billion funding round, Microsoft invested $750 million but refused to make a larger commitment, prompting Altman to seek other partners and express dissatisfaction with the exclusivity clause that requires OpenAI to obtain all its cloud capacity from Microsoft before 2030.

After Nadella's comments sparked speculation, Microsoft issued a statement saying:

"Microsoft supports the 'Stargate' project, and any statements regarding our $80 billion infrastructure are meant to convey our commitment, not a response to anything or anyone."