By MATT O’BRIEN

ABILENE, Texas (AP) — The afternoon sun was so hot that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traded his usual crewneck sweater for a T-shirt on the last legs of a Tuesday visit to the massive Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex that will power the future of ChatGPT.

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OpenAI announced Tuesday that its flagship AI data center in Texas will be joined by five others around the U.S. as the ChatGPT maker aims to make good on the $500 billion infrastructure investment promoted by President Donald Trump earlier this year.

Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, said it is building two more data center complexes in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio and another in a Midwest location it hasn’t yet disclosed.

But it’s the project in Abilene, Texas, that promised to be the biggest of them all, transforming what the city’s mayor called an old railroad town.

Oracle executives who visited the eight-building complex said it is already on track to be the world’s largest AI supercluster once fully built, a reference to its network of hundreds of thousands of AI chips that will be running in its massive, H-shaped buildings.

Altman said, “When you hit that button on ChatGPT, you really don’t — I don’t, at least” — think about what happens inside the data halls used to build and operate the chatbot.

He and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouyrk also sought to emphasize the steps they’ve taken to reduce the energy-hungry complex’s environmental effects on a drought-prone region of West Texas, where temperatures hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday.

“We’re burning gas to run this data center,” said Altman, but added that “in the long trajectory of Stargate” the hope is to rely on many other power sources.

The complex will require about 900 megawatts of electricity to power the eight buildings and their hundreds of thousands of specialized AI chips.

One of the buildings is already operating, and a second that Altman and Magouyrk visited Tuesday is nearly complete. Each server rack in those buildings holds 72 of Nvidia’s GB200 chips, which are specially designed for the most intensive AI workloads. Each building is expected to have about 60,000 of them.

More than 6,000 workers now commute to the massive construction project each day, in what Mayor Weldon Hurt described as a significant boost to the local economy. The campus and nearby expansion will provide nearly 1,700 jobs onsite when fully operational, Oracle said, with “thousands more indirect jobs” predicted to be created.

Hand-made signs lining the roads to the center market “move-in-ready” homes for workers.

A sign advertises housing for workers along the road to the Stargate artificial intelligence data center complex on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

“AI WORKERS? HUGE DISCOUNTS” says one promising homes with one to six bedrooms.

But Hurt also acknowledged that residents have mixed feelings about the project due to its water and energy needs.

The city’s chronically stressed reservoirs were at roughly half-capacity this week. Residents must follow a two-day-a-week outdoor watering schedule, trading off based on whether their address numbers are odd or even.

One million gallons of water from the city’s municipal water systems provides an “initial fill” for a closed-loop system that cools the data center’s computers and keeps the water from evaporating. After that initial fill, Oracle expects each of the eight buildings to need another 12,000 gallons per year, which it describes as a “remarkably low figure for a facility of this scale.”

“These data centers are designed to not use water,” Magouyrk said. “All of the data centers that we’re building (in) this part of Stargate are designed to not use water. The reason we do that is because it turns out that’s harmful for the environment and this is a better solution.”

The closed-loop system shows that the developer is “taking its impact on local public water supplies seriously,” but the overall environmental effect is more nuanced because such systems require more electricity, which also means higher indirect water usage through power generation, said Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied AI’s environmental toll.

Indeed, the data center complex includes a new gas-fired power plant, using natural gas turbines similar to those that power warships. The companies say the plant is meant to provide backup power for the data halls and is a better option than traditional diesel generators. Most of the power comes from the local grid, sourced from a mix of natural gas with the sprawling wind and solar farms that dot the windy and sunny region.

Ren said that “even with emission-reduction measures, the health impacts of essentially turning the data center site into a power plant deserve further study for nearby communities.”

Arlene Mendler, who moved to a rural area north of Abilene, Texas more than 30 years ago for the natural setting, is photographed on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

Arlene Mendler, a Stargate neighbor, said she wished she had more say in the project that eliminated a vast tract of mesquite shrubland, home to coyotes and roadrunners.

“It has completely changed the way we were living,” said Mendler, who lives across the street. “We moved up here 33 years ago for the peace, quiet, tranquility. After we got home from work, we could ride horses down the road. It was that type of a place.”

Now, she doesn’t know what to do about the constant cacophony of construction sounds or the bright lights that have altered her nighttime views. The project was essentially a done deal once she found out about it.

“They took 1,200 acres and just scraped it to bare dirt,” said her husband, Fred Mendler.

Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, shows media the Stargate artificial intelligence data center project in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday Sept. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

The first time most residents heard of Stargate — at least by that name — was when Trump announced the project shortly after returning to the White House in January. Originally planned as a facility to mine cryptocurrency, developers had pivoted and expanded their designs to tailor the project to the AI boom sparked by ChatGPT.

The partnership said at that time it was investing $100 billion — and eventually up to $500 billion — to build large-scale data centers and the energy generation needed to further AI development. More recently, OpenAI signed a deal to buy $300 billion of computing capacity from Oracle. It’s a huge bet for the San Francisco-based AI startup, which was founded as a nonprofit.

OpenAI and Oracle invited media and politicians, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, to tour the site for the first time Tuesday.

Cruz called Texas “ground zero for AI” because if “you’re building a data center, what do you want? No. 1, you want abundant, low-cost energy.”

From left, Rep. Jodey Arrington, Sen. Ted Cruz, Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman answer questions during a news conference on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025 in Abilene, Texas. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

Of the other five Stargate data center projects announced Tuesday, Oracle is working with OpenAI to build one just northeast of Abilene, in Shackelford County, Texas, and another in New Mexico’s Doña Ana County. It also said it is working to build one in the Midwest.

Softbank said it has broken ground on two more in Lordstown, Ohio, and in Milam County, Texas.

The projects offer OpenAI a way to break out from its longtime partnership with Microsoft, which until recently was the startup’s exclusive computing partner. Altman told The Associated Press his company has been “severely limited for the value we can offer to people.”

“ChatGPT is slow. It’s not as smart as we’d like to be. Many users can’t use it as much as they would like,” Altman said. “We have many other ideas and products we want to build.”

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

A 62-year-old man was sentenced Monday to eight months in the Washington County Jail after authorities found child sexual abuse material on his laptop while investigating a report that he molested a teen boy at his Newport apartment in 2021.

Davyd M. Bryan Delving-Thompson, now of St. Paul, reached a plea agreement with prosecutors in October that included the dismissal of a second-degree criminal sexual conduct charge in exchange for admitting to four counts of possession of child pornography.

Davyd M. Bryan Delving-Thompson (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Washington County District Judge Siv Mjanger accepted the agreement, but gave Delving-Thompson five more months in jail after he violated terms of his conditional release from jail after his plea. A two-and-a-half year prison term was stayed in favor of five years of supervised probation. He was given credit for just over three months in custody already served after his arrest.

According to the criminal complaint, a man reported in August 2021 that his two sons responded to an ad on Craigslist for a photo shoot and one of them — a 13-year-old — became a victim of sexual abuse.

The boy’s adult brother said he had exchanged emails with a man, whom authorities later identified as Delving-Thompson, about the online ad. The brother said he and his brother met the man, who went by “Michael,” at his apartment building in the 2300 block of Hastings Avenue in Newport.

Once in his living room, Delving-Thompson used his cellphone to take pictures of the brothers, who had their shirts off and were wearing swim trunks and underwear. Delving-Thompson “wanted them to pretend they were at the beach,” the complaint said.

They then went to his bedroom, where the brothers laid down with their backs to each other. Delving-Thompson closed the blinds for privacy. He rubbed the boy’s arm “to calm him down” and then his back, chest and legs, the complaint said. He then allegedly touched the boy’s penis.

The boy told Delving-Thompson that he wanted to go back to the living room and put on his shirt, but he asked the boy not to. In a hallway, Delving-Thompson asked the boy if he could touch his penis again, but the boy refused and Delving-Thompson “did it anyway,” the complaint said.

Delving-Thompson gave $300 to the brothers, who then left.

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Investigators searched Delving-Thompson’s apartment and seized a cell phone, tablet computer and laptop computer. Digital forensic analysis revealed the laptop had four photos and two videos of prepubescent boys and girls doing sexual acts. The photos were determined to be child sexual abuse material, identified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In December, two months after Delving-Thompson entered his guilty plea, he violated terms of the judge’s conditional release order by using the internet and a chat group, according to prosecutors. An arrest warrant was issued and he was taken into custody on Aug. 13.

Conditions of his probation include following recommendations of a psychosexual evaluation, no pornography and no contact with minors. After probation, he must register as a predatory offender for five years.

By MELINA WALLING and SETH BORENSTEIN

NEW YORK (AP) — Some countries’ leaders are watching rising seas threaten to swallow their homes. Others are watching their citizens die in floods, hurricanes and heat waves, all exacerbated by climate change.

But the world U.S. President Donald Trump described in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday didn’t match the one many world leaders in the audience are contending with. Nor did it align with what scientists have long been observing.

“This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion,” Trump said. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries’ fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

Trump has long been a critic of climate science and polices aimed at helping the world transition to green energies like wind and solar. His speech Tuesday, however, was one of his most expansive to date. It included false statements and making connections between things that are not connected.

Ilana Seid, an ambassador from the island nation of Palau and head of the organization of small island states, was in the audience. She said it’s what they’ve come to expect from Trump and the United States. She added that not acting on climate change will “be a betrayal of the most vulnerable,” a sentiment echoed by Evans Davie Njewa of Malawi, who said that “we are endangering the lives of innocent people in the world.”

For Adelle Thomas, a climate scientist who has published more than 40 studies and has a doctorate, climate change disasters are personal, too. A vice chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top body on climate science, Thomas is from the Bahamas and said she experienced firsthand “the devastation of the climate disaster” when Hurricane Sandy hit the Caribbean and New York City, the city Trump was speaking from, in 2012.

“Millions of people around the world can already testify to the devastation that climate change has brought to their lives,” she said. ‘The evidence is not abstract. It is lived, it is deadly, and it demands urgent action.”

People set up a “Climate Polluters Bill” the length of an Olympic swimming pool (50 meters long) through Manhattan at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York. The bill was created by Greenpeace and lists the costs of hundreds of climate-related natural disasters. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)

A look at some of Trump’s statements Tuesday, the science behind them and the reaction.

On renewable energy

WHAT HE SAID: Trump called renewable sources of energy like wind power a “joke” and “pathetic,” falsely claiming they don’t work, are too expensive and too weak.

THE BACKSTORY: Solar and wind are now “almost always” the least expensive and the fastest options for new electricity generation, according to a July report from the United Nations. That report also said the world has passed a “positive tipping point” where those energy sources will only continue to become more widespread.

The three cheapest electricity sources globally last year were onshore wind, solar panels and new hydropower, according to an energy cost report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Subsidies endorsed by Trump and the Republican party are artificially keeping fossil fuels viable, said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. “If one were truly in favor of the ‘free market’ to determine this, then fossil fuels would be disappearing even faster,” he wrote in an email.

Relatedly, Trump falsely claimed European electricity bills are now “two to three times higher than the United States, and our bills are coming way down.” But in fact retail electricity prices in the United States have increased faster than the rate of inflation since 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency expects prices to continue increasing through 2026.

On the international politics of climate, the UN and the Paris Accord

WHAT HE SAID: Trump blasted the U.N.’s climate efforts, saying he withdrew America from the “fake” Paris climate accord because “America was paying so much more than every country, others weren’t paying.”

THE BACKSTORY: The Paris Agreement, decided by international consensus in 2015, is a voluntary but binding document in which each country is asked to set its own national goal to curb planet-warming emissions and decide how much money it will contribute to the countries that will be hit hardest by climate change.

Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, the United States has put out more of the heat trapping gas than any other nation, even though China now is the No. 1 carbon polluter. Since 1850, the U.S. has contributed 24% of the human-caused carbon dioxide that’s in the air, according to Global Carbon Project data. The entire continent of Africa, with four times the population of the U.S., is responsible for about 3%.

Art pieces of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk with bloody hands carrying globes are marched through Manhattan at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)

On coal being referred to as clean

WHAT HE SAID: “I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word ‘coal.’ Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal.’ Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”

THE BACKSTORY: Coal kills millions of people a year. “The president can pretend coal is clean, but real people — mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters— will die for this lie,’’ said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson..

Trump also called the carbon footprint “a hoax made up by people with evil intentions,” a contention that Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler agreed with. Dessler said the term was coined by oiil companies and may have been designed to shift the responsibility for combatting climate change away from corporations to individuals.

The science of climate change started 169 years ago when Eunice Foote did simple experiments with flasks and sunlight showing that carbon dioxide trapped more heat than the regular atmosphere. It’s an experiment that can be repeated at home and has been done in labs hundreds of times and in greenhouses around the world every day. It is basic physics and chemistry with a long history.

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,” reported the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is hundreds of scientists, with doctorates in the field.

In 2018, Trump’s own government said: “The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future.”

On cows and methane

WHAT HE SAID: In “the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore.”

THE BACKSTORY: Cows belch methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Around the world, cattle are often raised on lands where forests have cut down. Since forests capture carbon dioxide, cutting them to raise cattle results in a doublt whammy. Still, no one is suggesting that cows be gotten rid of, said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the Changing Markets Foundation.

“This polarizing and divisive language misrepresents the environmental message,” Urbancic wrote. “What is true, however, is that cutting methane emissions is a quick win to slow global heating and meet climate targets.”

Trump also blamed dirty air blowing in from afar, floating garbage in the ocean coming from other countries and “radicalized environmentalists.”

Although the United States does indeed now have cleaner air than it has in decades, the pollution seeping into communities is primarily caused by local dirty energy and industry projects, not by other countries. And many experts have said the biggest blow to local air and water quality is the Trump administration’s own wide-ranging rollbacks to the power of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other bedrock environmental laws.

“It is sad to see marine debris, a globally important issue, being misrepresented so completely,” said Lucy Woodall, an associate professor of marine conservation and policy at the University of Exeter.

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Associated Press reporters Matthew Daly, Jennifer McDermott and Annika Hammerschlag contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By LAURA UNGAR

Faith Ayer had no qualms about taking Tylenol for chronic migraines and COVID-19 during her pregnancy, and grew disappointed and angry as she watched President Donald Trump rail against the pain medicine.

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“A lot of the claims that were shared have just not been backed by evidence,” said Ayer, a nurse practitioner in Jacksonville, Florida, who is about 17 weeks pregnant with her first child. She said Trump’s words have implications “for patients across the country and even across the world.”

During a White House news conference on Monday, Trump repeatedly warned pregnant women not to take Tylenol because of the risk of autism in their children. He also fueled debunked claims that ingredients in vaccines or timing shots close together could contribute to rising rates of autism. Trump’s comments left some pregnant women angry and others with questions.

Dr. R. Todd Ivey, an OB-GYN in Houston, said he’s already heard from a few patients and expects to get a lot more questions in the coming weeks.

“People are concerned,” he said. “But what I’m doing is reassuring patients that there is no causation that has ever been proven.”

Moms have mixed reactions to Trump’s announcement

As a nurse, Ayer knew she didn’t have a lot of options for treating her migraines and a fever she spiked during a bout of COVID-19.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has long considered Tylenol, also known by the generic name acetaminophen, one of the only safe pain relievers during pregnancy. Five years ago, the Food and Drug Administration warned that the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen might cause rare but serious kidney problems in a fetus.

“Weighing benefits and risks, I had no reservations when taking Tylenol,” the 30-year-old Ayer said, especially since she knew that untreated fevers in pregnancy, particularly in the first trimester, increase the risk for miscarriages, preterm birth and other problems.

Despite her medical knowledge, she had a conversation with her doctor about taking Tylenol “and kind of got the all clear on their end, too.”

When she gives birth, she plans to give her baby all the vaccines that medical experts recommend.

But other pregnant women are not so sure about things.

Dr. Stella Dantas, an OB-GYN in Portland, Oregon, said she was starting to get questions through her patient email system.

“I anticipate we’re going to have a lot of anxiety about using acetaminophen, which we counsel them is OK to use if they have a headache, if they have a fever,” she said. “There are a number of reasons patients will need to take it, and patients already feel anxious about taking any medication in pregnancy.”

Doctors reassure patients that Tylenol and vaccines are safe

Dr. Clayton Alfonso, an OB-GYN at Duke University in North Carolina, is drafting up standard responses for the nursing team to give out to Tylenol inquiries.

The main message: Tylenol has been around for decades, is safe, and has not been shown to cause autism.

Acetaminophen use during pregnancy hadn’t increased in recent decades like autism rates have, according to the Coalition of Autism Scientists.

Some studies have raised the possibility that taking acetaminophen in pregnancy might be associated with a risk of autism — but many others haven’t found a connection. One challenge is that it’s hard to disentangle the effects of Tylenol use from the effects of high fevers during pregnancy.

Science has shown autism is mostly rooted in genetics. Experts say different combinations of genes and other factors — such as age of the child’s father and whether the mother had health problems during the pregnancy — can all affect how a fetal brain develops.

Besides letting patients know “there has been no causal link established or proven” between Tylenol use in pregnancy and autism, Dantas said she’s also advising patients against “toughing it out” if they have fever or pain.

“A healthy pregnancy starts with a healthy mom,” Dantas said. “So I would ask patients if they are concerned to consult their physicians. And trust in the medical advice given to them.”

Doctors said much the same about advising patients to get their newborns vaccinated. Ivey said doctors are seeing more people decline vaccinations lately, which “speaks to the distrust for the medical community in general.”

“We know that these vaccines save lives,” and don’t cause autism, he said.

Doctors also said they don’t want women to doubt what they did during pregnancy if their child does develop autism.

“We need to take a deep breath,” Ivey said. “We need to trust the people that are doing the work – the scientists, the physicians, the other health care providers.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.