OpenAI has reportedly signed a contract to purchase $300 billion of computing capacity from Oracle over roughly five years starting in 2027, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter.
The scale would make it one of the largest cloud agreements on record. Neither company has publicly confirmed the contract.
The reported arrangement would require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity for new data centres, roughly comparable to electricity for about four million homes. It highlights how AI infrastructure buildouts are reshaping capital allocation across the technology sector, even as questions persist about sustainability, financing and supply chains.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Oracle shares rose by as much as 43 per cent on Wednesday after the company disclosed it had added $317 billion in future contract revenue for the quarter to 31 August. The surge, the paper said, lifted chair Larry Ellison’s personal wealth by more than $100 billion to nearly $400 billion—allowing him to briefly surpass Elon Musk to become the world’s richest person.
The newspaper characterised the OpenAI arrangement as a calculated risk for both firms, noting OpenAI disclosed roughly $10 billion in annual revenue in June and would on average be committing around $60 billion a year for compute, while Oracle would be concentrating a large portion of future revenue on a single customer and may need to raise additional financing to secure AI chips and build facilities.
Additional context reported by the Verge places the contract within OpenAI’s broader Stargate data centre initiative, where Oracle and OpenAI have previously outlined plans tied to 4.5 gigawatts of capacity. Earnings commentary at Oracle referenced strong demand across customers. “Four multi-billion-dollar contracts” were signed in the first quarter by three unnamed companies, said Safra Catz, chief executive officer of Oracle, during the firm’s update.
The Journal’s reporting added that OpenAI has received leeway to add new cloud providers after years of primarily relying on Microsoft for compute. It also cited data showing Oracle has a higher debt load than some cloud rivals, with a total debt to equity ratio of 427 per cent versus 32.7 per cent for Microsoft, underscoring the financing demands of large-scale AI data centre buildouts.
