"No one could have predicted that permits and infrastructure necessary for this project's completion would be delayed". Except for every project that's needed permits and infrastructure ever.
I really don't get who keeps using Oracle outside of Java, and how they make their money, must be some legacy contracts or something, but Oracle has always been customer hostile, from all the things I've heard, they sound like a ransomware company (idk if they still do it, but they'd sell you the database, then "audit you" and if you used anything that wasn't in compliance, fine you, until you converted that to Oracle DB too or whatever wild stuff). I just don't get it. I get even less how its execs are okay running what could be a much more successful company so poorly. You can change Oracle for the better and become even more profitable if you change how you do business.
Take Java as a solid example, they removed JavaFX from the core of Java, which made everyone think JavaFX was dead, recently they started providing enterprise support for JavaFX, which signals its production ready, but, who wants to trust Oracle? I sure don't. I can use C# for free without any of that baggage, and if I get all sorts of stable options for a GUI, and with Avalonia (and Uno?) I can run my GUI on any OS.
"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.
I’ve been on some teams where some SQL devs can do some non intuitive things with SQL (particularly some of the enterprise features from Oracle). Not saying they were the right decisions but I do think some processes get knitted to these enterprise features and it’s painful to walk back later
Will be interesting to see what excuses these companies will come up with to justify stopping investment in AI without spelling it out. The first one was already announced: it's going to kill everyone so we need to proceed more slowly.
Finding out that Oracle has a bond rating of BBB- [1] (one step above junk bonds) feels very appropriate for such a company with such a sordid history.
I can't reconcile that with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831204 . Everyone knows about Oracle's incompetence already and should reasonably be able to predict it, especially themselves.
Right, Oracle is at the bottom of the heap (they borrowed the most with the least initial credibility— who the fuck seriously thinks Oracle was ever going to be a major player in AI), so weakness in the market will appear with them first. But I think it will bubble its way up.
Oracle's specialty is extracting money from the government for everything IT-related. Why wouldn't they be a major player? Investors might not have foreseen DOGE and Grok.
Due to the difficulty of building and the time lead, there will be a multiple of applications for every data center that actually comes to fruition.
But if you're talking about the capital investment that's being talked about as too high, I would agree that it's way too high, as all these big tech breakthroughs result in too much building at first. Which hurts the builder's profitability but helps consumers.
> Why would Anthropic pay through the nose and make such desperate moves for compute?
That's pretty consistent with them having not been able to get the physical data centre capacity they have supposedly had built actually online, isn't it?
More to the point, Anthropic appears to mostly be capable of serving its customers, doesn't it? It's not so resource-starved that people aren't able to use it at all.
So what does it tell you that only 300 megawatts was enough to make a very meaningful difference to that?
If Anthropic's fortunes can be meaningfully changed by only 300MW which allowed them to uncap their customers, what is the case — even including OpenAI and Google -- for the demand for the 23GW of unbuilt AI data centre build commitments out there?
If there's that much demand, how did 300MW have such a radical impact?
Satya Nadella himself said there will be some oversupply. What if there is actually lots of oversupply?
My instinct is that the internet/software/IT industry sees its own demand for Anthropic and OpenAI and is misleading itself into thinking that this is representative of the demand in the rest of the industry, when what possible other human industry tasks are there that match the compute demands of writing software? Surely generating software is actually the outlier use here?
Another way to look at it: if the general demand for AI compute is so insatiable, how in this world of insatiable demand did xAI have spare capacity to lease? Why does Meta have spare capacity to lease?
The issue here is very evidently one of allocation. But allocation tends to get solved over time.
When our spot instances go away and don't come back, that's a sign that there's not enough capacity.
There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.
Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.
Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.
The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.
Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.
The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.
There's a huge gap between what's being described in that comment and an "extinction level event" is that's what ELE means.
What's being talked about is a massive extension of human capability, into the intellectual sphere rather than the physical environment. The atom bomb had a clear way to get to extinction, a sudden chain reaction that leads to collapse of the entire biome.
The only way AI gets there is something like control of the nuclear weapons on all sides and that control becoming suicidal. Every other major event leads to at most civilization collapse, after which I assume we will have some sort of Butlerian Jihad restrictions on getting into the same situation.
But, I would love to know what I'm missing here, if ELE has clearer routes!!
Everyone is interpreting this as a sign the bubble is bursting, when the actual story is costs for materials and labor are going up and delays are happening because so many data centers are getting built.
If Oracle was able to build the data center under-cost and faster than expected, that would be a better sign the bubble was bursting!
What does it change exactly? It's not like gas or materials are going to get cheaper any time soon. It can burst for a whole lot of reasons, including the 2nd coming of Jesus or resources price... it's not like people have been calling AI ressource intensive for years right ?
Right, so the presumably the revenue projections aren't increasing at the same pace and the financials don't make sense anymore. Which is potentially a sign of the bubble bursting.
>How profitable a datacenter is, is kind of irrelevant to the convo, if you are unable to power it due to material shortages.
It isn't irrelevant, because they have to make money to be built. The debt for these projects was already issued, so you have to pay the coupons. If Oracle doesn't pay the developer is gonna suffer on their end.
Doesn't 'Force Majeure' mean exceptional events outside ones control? Pretty sure everything involved here is Oracles own making lol
"No one could have predicted that permits and infrastructure necessary for this project's completion would be delayed". Except for every project that's needed permits and infrastructure ever.
I hope whoever buys Oracle fires Larry by email.
> I hope whoever buys Oracle fires Larry by email.
I certainly hope not; you can't fire[1] someone via email.
============================
[1] Out of a canon. Into the sun.
"Well a wave hit it"
A wave hit the Oracle?
I really don't get who keeps using Oracle outside of Java, and how they make their money, must be some legacy contracts or something, but Oracle has always been customer hostile, from all the things I've heard, they sound like a ransomware company (idk if they still do it, but they'd sell you the database, then "audit you" and if you used anything that wasn't in compliance, fine you, until you converted that to Oracle DB too or whatever wild stuff). I just don't get it. I get even less how its execs are okay running what could be a much more successful company so poorly. You can change Oracle for the better and become even more profitable if you change how you do business.
Take Java as a solid example, they removed JavaFX from the core of Java, which made everyone think JavaFX was dead, recently they started providing enterprise support for JavaFX, which signals its production ready, but, who wants to trust Oracle? I sure don't. I can use C# for free without any of that baggage, and if I get all sorts of stable options for a GUI, and with Avalonia (and Uno?) I can run my GUI on any OS.
> I really don't get who keeps using Oracle
"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.
Is there a list somewhere of major "enterprises" in this position? I've always kinda wondered how Java keeps its edge over C# in the TIOBE rankings.
I’ve been on some teams where some SQL devs can do some non intuitive things with SQL (particularly some of the enterprise features from Oracle). Not saying they were the right decisions but I do think some processes get knitted to these enterprise features and it’s painful to walk back later
My company uses Oracle BRM to bill for millions of phone calls each month. It would be such a crazy upheaval project to move from that.
Millions per month is tens per minute. That doesn't seem like all that much to me?
> they removed JavaFX from the core of Java
You can still use OpenJFX with OpenJDK, can't you?
I'm surprised to hear that solid-oxide fuel cells are apparently a non-gimmick thing now.
> "Oracle signed a deal with solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) developer Bloom last year for 1.8GW of power, expanding it to 2.8GW of capacity in April."
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-mexico-regula...
Apparently this one would have been the largest SOFC installation, by far.
Will be interesting to see what excuses these companies will come up with to justify stopping investment in AI without spelling it out. The first one was already announced: it's going to kill everyone so we need to proceed more slowly.
Surely this will assuage the creditors that Oracle is going to pay back its $100B+ loans.
Reuters has a non-paywalled (short) report with a bit of detail:
https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...
Reuters is paywalled now. They use what they call a “dynamic paywall”, discussed here: https://digiday.com/media/how-reuters-dynamic-paywall-is-boo...
A better overview of the situation with more context exists on Yahoo Finance [0], also there is no paywall.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/oracle-cite...
Oracle's $165B New Mexico Data Center Plan Hits a Gas Pipeline Delay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321142 - August 2026
Finding out that Oracle has a bond rating of BBB- [1] (one step above junk bonds) feels very appropriate for such a company with such a sordid history.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/vie...
'Force Majeure' is a good way to describe their incompetence.
I can't reconcile that with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831204 . Everyone knows about Oracle's incompetence already and should reasonably be able to predict it, especially themselves.
Right, Oracle is at the bottom of the heap (they borrowed the most with the least initial credibility— who the fuck seriously thinks Oracle was ever going to be a major player in AI), so weakness in the market will appear with them first. But I think it will bubble its way up.
Oracle's specialty is extracting money from the government for everything IT-related. Why wouldn't they be a major player? Investors might not have foreseen DOGE and Grok.
Still too high of a rating.
It's based solely on thejr expected ability to replay, not their ethics.
The number of datacenters needing to come online doesn't add up to me. It's suspicious
Due to the difficulty of building and the time lead, there will be a multiple of applications for every data center that actually comes to fruition.
But if you're talking about the capital investment that's being talked about as too high, I would agree that it's way too high, as all these big tech breakthroughs result in too much building at first. Which hurts the builder's profitability but helps consumers.
How so? It's clear the hyperscalers can't keep up with demand.
Is it clear they need anything like the unbuilt capacity that is in the pipeline?
They are using tiny fractions of the data centres they claim to have "built".
There's a significant risk of a Chinese real-estate bubble here.
What source do you have for "using tiny fractions of the data centres"?
The money doesn't seem to back this up. Why would Anthropic pay through the nose and make such desperate moves for compute?
> Why would Anthropic pay through the nose and make such desperate moves for compute?
That's pretty consistent with them having not been able to get the physical data centre capacity they have supposedly had built actually online, isn't it?
More to the point, Anthropic appears to mostly be capable of serving its customers, doesn't it? It's not so resource-starved that people aren't able to use it at all.
So what does it tell you that only 300 megawatts was enough to make a very meaningful difference to that?
If Anthropic's fortunes can be meaningfully changed by only 300MW which allowed them to uncap their customers, what is the case — even including OpenAI and Google -- for the demand for the 23GW of unbuilt AI data centre build commitments out there?
If there's that much demand, how did 300MW have such a radical impact?
Satya Nadella himself said there will be some oversupply. What if there is actually lots of oversupply?
My instinct is that the internet/software/IT industry sees its own demand for Anthropic and OpenAI and is misleading itself into thinking that this is representative of the demand in the rest of the industry, when what possible other human industry tasks are there that match the compute demands of writing software? Surely generating software is actually the outlier use here?
Another way to look at it: if the general demand for AI compute is so insatiable, how in this world of insatiable demand did xAI have spare capacity to lease? Why does Meta have spare capacity to lease?
The issue here is very evidently one of allocation. But allocation tends to get solved over time.
When our spot instances go away and don't come back, that's a sign that there's not enough capacity.
There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.
Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.
Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.
The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.
Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.
The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.
Everything is going to be AI soon.
> I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo.
If your take on the abilities of AI is correct, we aren't talking about upending the status quo, we're talking about an ELE for the human race.
There's a huge gap between what's being described in that comment and an "extinction level event" is that's what ELE means.
What's being talked about is a massive extension of human capability, into the intellectual sphere rather than the physical environment. The atom bomb had a clear way to get to extinction, a sudden chain reaction that leads to collapse of the entire biome.
The only way AI gets there is something like control of the nuclear weapons on all sides and that control becoming suicidal. Every other major event leads to at most civilization collapse, after which I assume we will have some sort of Butlerian Jihad restrictions on getting into the same situation.
But, I would love to know what I'm missing here, if ELE has clearer routes!!
AI sucks or it's an "extinction level event".
Crazy times.
Everyone is interpreting this as a sign the bubble is bursting, when the actual story is costs for materials and labor are going up and delays are happening because so many data centers are getting built.
If Oracle was able to build the data center under-cost and faster than expected, that would be a better sign the bubble was bursting!
What does it change exactly? It's not like gas or materials are going to get cheaper any time soon. It can burst for a whole lot of reasons, including the 2nd coming of Jesus or resources price... it's not like people have been calling AI ressource intensive for years right ?
Right, so the presumably the revenue projections aren't increasing at the same pace and the financials don't make sense anymore. Which is potentially a sign of the bubble bursting.
I mean the literal guidance is that Oracle may not make money on the datacenter by 2028 because they won't be able to turn it on.
How profitable a datacenter is, is kind of irrelevant to the convo, if you are unable to power it due to material shortages.
>How profitable a datacenter is, is kind of irrelevant to the convo, if you are unable to power it due to material shortages.
It isn't irrelevant, because they have to make money to be built. The debt for these projects was already issued, so you have to pay the coupons. If Oracle doesn't pay the developer is gonna suffer on their end.
Never understood how you posters have confidence to talk about stuff you have little domain specific knowledge of.