This week's announcement by President Donald Trump of a massive private-sector investment to build more AI data centers casts a spotlight on a relatively small and nimble class of cloud computing firms positioned to play a bigger role in the tech sector.

OpenAI will build and open AI infrastructure worth $500 billion in the United States over the next four years in partnership with SoftBank. The two entities have teamed up to establish a new company called the Stargate Project to build AI data centers for the ChatGPT maker,