Oracle and OpenAI have canceled plans to expand their flagship Abilene Stargate data center campus.

The project is developed by Crusoe on Lancium's Clean Campus in Texas, and is the first Stargate project to go live since the '$500 billion' joint venture was announced last year. The facilities are operated by Oracle for OpenAI use.

Two data center buildings launched last September, with six more due this year for a total capacity of around 1.2GW. The two companies were then expected to grow the site to 2GW.

However, Bloomberg reports, this expansion has been canceled. Plans were complicated by financing challenges and OpenAI’s frequently changing demand forecasting and shifting view of Stargate.

At the same time, a multi-day outage this year that was caused by winter weather impacting some of the liquid cooling equipment reportedly damaged relations between OpenAI and Crusoe.

The Information reports that power will also not be ready at the site for a year, by which point OpenAI hopes to deploy Nvidia Vera Rubin chips instead of the Blackwell GPUs going to Abilene, so would rather do so at a new campus.

"Our flagship Stargate site is one of the largest AI data center campuses in the United States," OpenAI compute scaling exec Sachin Katti said in a statement.

"We considered expanding it further, but ultimately chose to put that additional capacity in other locations. Today we have more than half a dozen sites under development across multiple states, including the site we're building with Oracle in Wisconsin, where the first steel beams went up just this week."

Earlier this year, OpenAI's director of physical infrastructure, Keith Heyde, abruptly left the company. Heyde had been a vocal proponent of OpenAI's in-house data center efforts, but the company has increasingly signed cloud contracts.

OpenAI has around $600bn in projected compute spend by 2030, an apparent reduction on an earlier pledge to spend $1.4tn by 2033.

With as much as $300bn set to go to Oracle, that cloud provider has itself struggled to fund its data center buildout, and is loading up on debt and planning to lay off thousands to cover costs.

Fellow Stargate backer SoftBank is also turning to debt to fund OpenAI's expansion, and is currently seeking $40bn in loans.

As for the Abilene site, GPU giant Nvidia has stepped in to try to help Crusoe lease the remaining capacity to Meta.

In an unusual move aimed at ensuring a rival chip designer's product does not end up in data centers at the site, the company has reportedly paid a $150 million deposit to Crusoe to secure the site and is in talks with Meta.

A deal between Crusoe and Meta has yet to be signed.