Oracle Cites 'Force Majeure' to Shield Itself on Controversial Data Center

ssimonpure about 2 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on bloomberg.com

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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

giancarlostoro•6 minutes ago

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.

ozlikethewizard•43 minutes ago

Doesn't 'Force Majeure' mean exceptional events outside ones control? Pretty sure everything involved here is Oracles own making lol

chuckadams•26 minutes ago

"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.

mckirk•25 minutes ago

"Well a wave hit it"

peri-cl•13 minutes ago

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.

potatototoo99•about 1 hour ago

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.

0cf8612b2e1e•24 minutes ago

Surely this will assuage the creditors that Oracle is going to pay back its $100B+ loans.

blakesterz•about 1 hour ago

Reuters has a non-paywalled (short) report with a bit of detail:

https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...

WalterGR•2 minutes ago

[delayed]

Dangeranger•34 minutes ago

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...

toomuchtodo•about 2 hours ago

Oracle's $165B New Mexico Data Center Plan Hits a Gas Pipeline Delay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321142 - August 2026

shimman•about 1 hour ago

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...

CodeCompost•about 1 hour ago

'Force Majeure' is a good way to describe their incompetence.

Analemma_•about 1 hour ago

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.

someonebaggy•44 minutes ago

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.

apercu•about 1 hour ago

Still too high of a rating.

someonebaggy•44 minutes ago

It's based solely on thejr expected ability to replay, not their ethics.

WokeUp420•about 1 hour ago

The number of datacenters needing to come online doesn't add up to me. It's suspicious

kilroy123•about 1 hour ago

How so? It's clear the hyperscalers can't keep up with demand.

dofm•33 minutes ago

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.

kilroy123•13 minutes ago

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?

echelon•about 1 hour ago

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.

toasty228•about 1 hour ago

No shit, you're telling me mixing Trump, Musk, Oracle and Softbank would end up in yet another scam? Just a way to quickly pump stocks and get money? No way duuude, who would have thought?!

bpodgursky•about 1 hour ago

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!

toasty228•43 minutes ago

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 ?

mamonster•41 minutes ago

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.

bpodgursky•37 minutes ago

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.

uhhh•2 minutes ago

Never understood how you posters have confidence to talk about stuff you have little domain specific knowledge of.

mamonster•28 minutes ago

>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.