Artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has agreed to lease 4.5 gigawatts of computing power from Oracle in a deal worth around $30 billion per year, making it one of the largest cloud agreements for AI to date.
The partnership is part of OpenAI’s “Stargate” data centre project, which aims to provide access to vast amounts of computing power to develop its powerful AI models. Oracle will develop multiple data centres across the US in response to the new contract, according to people close to the plans.
The deal marks a significant expansion of Stargate, with OpenAI and SoftBank investing as much as $500 billion to build data centres globally. Oracle has pledged to invest $7 billion in the joint venture and plans to spend $25 billion on capital expenditure next year.
The partnership also highlights Oracle’s growing presence in the cloud computing market, which has seen a sharp increase in demand for data centre infrastructure as companies seek to run AI systems. The deal is worth almost triple Oracle’s annual revenue from its data centre infrastructure business in 2025.
Oracle shares soared following the announcement, and the company is now expected to be one of the main beneficiaries of limits on capacity at rivals, including Microsoft, which has seen large tech companies plough hundreds of billions of dollars into data centre projects to train and operate AI models.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/b4324903-ff53-48c2-bf71-4151cd4f68d0