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Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity
(ft.com)
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by Betelbuddy
by Betelbuddy
> "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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy
I was surprised to read we're already building fuel cell power plants on this scale (this is a first of its kind project—by far this startup's largest customer). I didn't realize the tech was that mature. Now I'm left wondering if they actually ever intended to, or whether this was some kind of circular financial-engineering vaporware.
if it works then they delegated successfully and the project is winning and if not then they blame the neophyte VP and walk away with another quarterly bonus anyway.
I think this was motivated by a mixture of greenwashing and financial shenanigans. That much gas turbine capacity has a leadtime of several years now. Nobody knows if Bloom can scale up to match the requirements. I'd bet against it just because the consumables and operations of the Bloom fuel cells is pretty complex and pushing the limits in terms of heat and other parameters.
This would have been simply a natural gas power plant, of a different type.
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Since when can failing to get a permit be considered force majeure?
Doesn't majeure specifically denote something large scale and out of anyone's control, such as a hurricane?
And it depends on why they didn't get the permits.
Miss a deadline for filing? Not force majeure.
Permit that was reasonably expected to be granted denied due to a major shift in public policy? Possibly force majeure.
Power companies refuse to provide service due to a decline in overall capacity or spike in overall demand not reasonably foreseeable by the contracting parties? Possibly force majeure.
The big tech companies have typically used Special Purpose Vehicles ("SPVs") [1] for their hyperscalar investments and there's a lot of insulation from financial woes. Here's an example structure:
1. One subsidiary (or SPV) builds the physical building the data center is in. That's all it does;
2. The main SPV will lease the building from (1). It borrows a bunch of money for the GPUs and other hardware.
So, done right, if a hyperscalar fails, the company only loses the hardware.
Has Oracle done this correctly or have they screwed up and the debtholders have rights to Oracle itself in the case of a default?
The bigger issue for the economy is similar to 2008. There is so much AI debt that it's impossible to avoid. Mutual funds, pension funds, retirement accounts, etc will all be exposed to it so you can get a cascading economic collapse.
[1]: https://www.ernestchiang.com/en/posts/2025/off-balance-sheet...
You keep saying those words, I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Like, if Oracle is trying to get out of contractual obligations due to "force majeure", but claiming it doesn't mean there's any change to delivery expectations... I don't think that's going to work very well for them in court if someone takes it there? (Although it maybe wouldn't have anyway, so they maybe don't care about adding BS on top of BS?)
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Also worst comes to worst government will have to bail them out to not cause massive unrest
It's just a type of battery, that takes fuel, as its refillable energy source. Weird but it works.
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With the contracts that "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" jumped on its without a doubt Oracle going down second if not first.
He's just gambling because he's old and feeling bold.
It’s like if I see the EU announce a large investment in AI, always makes me nervous given how we are often late to the party
https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investor...
The whole thing is amazing, but it gets even better on page 45.
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He's only 82, and he's got a billion-dollar nonprofit dedicated to keeping him healthy. Don't count on him being on the way out.
Investors who (rightfully) see this "force majeure" claim as bullshit will have to drag Oracle through court, and Oracle probably counts on this taking years to get settled.
He wrote at lest one very thoughtful essay expanding on his belief that idolizing the wealthy undermines the basic principles of free and civil society. He criticized large accumulations of wealth as "a monopoly against one's countrymen." And something like half of The Wealth of Nations was committed to suggesting government policies to prevent an entrenched uber-wealthy class from forming, precisely so that capitalism could work as intended.
Hindsight is 20/20. He was suggesting free markets as the counter to entrenches aristocrats. It took centuries for our modern understanding of monopolies and rentier capitalism to develop.
A deregulated market is terrible for the environment, the economy and pretty much everyone and everything. It only gives more relative wealth (and power) to the oligarchs, who then lord over us unopposed.
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Hard disagree. Oracle's database will always live in my mind as a complete waste of money. Some con-man, I'm sorry salesman, sold a previous (idiot) executive on it at a previous company I worked for. The exec was long gone and lots of time was wasted trying to adapt our application (that used MySQL) over to Oracle until we finally pulled the plug. But not after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on time and equipment. We re-purposed the hardware into effectively a big NAS.
Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.
Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!
This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.
The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.
AFAICT the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS DBs is vendor support and the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS vendors like Percona is a ginormous marketing budget. I'm always grimused when I see Oracle product placement in the MCU.
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If you have a machine which is worthless after 3 years, then if you only run it for 12 hours a day rather than 24 then it costs twice as much per hour in deprecation.
If your machine costs $1000 to buy and $1 a day for 24 hours to run with a lifetime of 1000 days, then the total cost is $2000 to generate 24,000 hours of output, or 8 cents an hour.
If you run it for 12 hours your cost drops to $1500 to generate 12,000 hours of output, or 12 cents an hour.
You could of course just add batteries to your solar. A 5GW power plant in the south of the US, add 10GW or 20GW of solar, add 60GWh of battery storage, in summer export excess to grid (when there's a lot of demand for AC), in winter you could import a small amount from grid, or run smaller amounts of energy.
The capital cost is way below the cost of the equipment you're powering, and land is less than a rounding error. If you don't have the grid then just don't export the excess power, or use it to give free EV charging to locals
>Overview Energy makes satellites that beam solar energy to Earth.
Its amusing watching cloud AI users struggle to grasp even direct impacts of their use.
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There's certainly been some small attacks in the EU+ caused by Russia, and many more attributed to Russia, and of course Ukraine, which is not in the EU and never has been, is bombing Russian cities in retaliation for the massive invasion and continued occupation Russia launched some years ago.
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Back when I worked at a university, writing ETL scripts for Peoplesoft felt like I was carrying buckets of data by hand.
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Let's disregard that ever since Reagan, no president was ever able to slow the runaway financialisation of capitalism, or the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Capital has known no major blowbacks in many decades, and it's never been so powerful before.
I’ve heard that at least the Oracle client is not as bad these days.
My guess would be the cause is unreasonable corporate pressure for productivity, so if this is the case the natural answer would be to give people more time to think about architecture, create incentives for group studies and laboratories and remove incentives that lead to the so called "résumé-driven development"
Back in 2018, a former Oracle developer explained what it was like working on Oracle DB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
> Here is how the life of an Oracle Database developer is:
> - Start working on a new bug.
> - Spend two weeks trying to understand the 20 different flags that interact in mysterious ways to cause this bag.
> - Add one more flag to handle the new special scenario. Add a few more lines of code that checks this flag and works around the problematic situation and avoids the bug.
> - Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.
> - Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.
> - Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.
> - Add a few more flags in an attempt to fix the issue. Submit the changes again for testing. Wait another 20 to 30 hours.
> - Rinse and repeat for another two weeks until you get the mysterious incantation of the combination of flags right.
Seems like their comment is still valid today.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/database-console...
But polluting the poll with unusable connections is just Oracle copying the MS-SQL's thing. The C# recommended coding practices will automatically deal with this. (Not that you would want to follow them, but you may want to look and copy this part.)
Got a reference for that?
You are not forced to accept them.
Back in the late 90s, Oracle RDBMS was the "won't get fired for buying" RDBMS. It's been downhill ever since. Once Postgres got partitions, it was over.
Oracle still had a market for high availability clusters for a while, but the increasing performance of single servers and SANs and finally cloud services made that redundant.
So Oracle have spent the last 20 years being bastards about licensing, squeezing their existing customers while the customers do their best to migrate somewhere else.
That's like selling or renting you a car and disallowing you from saying bad things about it, or to tell others the horsepower or max speed.
My handle notwithstanding, I'm smart enough to not take legal advice from HN but nonetheless I cannot stop myself hence the rhetorical question: how is a EULA clause like that even enforceable? If this isn't going against freedom of speech then this surely it's against some consumer protection laws?
The cynical answer to that I guess is "a lot of money funding a legal team the size of a warlord's militia" and also "lobbying" but even then it doesn't track to me that this clause could have even that much of an effect as a scare tactic?
Basically ToS can't overrule the law, but the law doesn't seem to limit much what can be put in ToS, so abuse will always end up in court.
The problem is that the consequence of this is this filters significantly in favor of the company which complaints are worth taking to court, given that these companies have legions of lawyers on payroll.
The EULA is enforceable because you have to agree to it to use the software, and Oracle has large and well financed legal team who will descend from a great height on you and anyone who publishes the results of you doing performance testing.
In the EU (and still the UK since they've not changed the law since) you have the right to benchmark software.
However, it doesn't include the right to publish the results, so you can only do it internally for Oracle and any software that has similar clauses.
Oracle isn’t the government, they have the freedom of association which means they are under no obligation to license their database to you.
NDAs are well established law, you could view this a very limited in scope NDA.
The fact that those are so few relative to what dividends would be is a measure of the market's (lack of) health. But it doesn't automatically make the market a Ponzi scheme.
It's not the government restricting your right to speak (1st amendment in the US), it's a private corporate "person".
If you don't like the conditions of the license, you can do one of three things:
1. Don't use the software
2. Use the software in violation of the license, and face the consequences if the copyright owner takes action against you.
3. Get the laws of copyright changed so that conditions about publishing benchmarks is not allowed to be removed by a license.
The licensing laws around copyright have been developed over the last few centuries. They can be changed.
But until they are, the limits are what they are. Currently, Oracle can put conditions on benchmarking and publishing the results in their license and its not only legal for them to do so, but they have prevailed in court when enforcing those conditions.
There's no "meeting of minds" and there's no exchange of value if I simply benchmark a piece of software and then don't use it any further.
This is a bit of a grey zone legally, and steps all over a bunch of consumer protection laws, free speech laws, etc... depending on the jurisdiction.
IMHO governments should explicitly ban these "gag clauses" because it prevents free market competition if customers are not allowed to benchmark software and publish the results.
However they haven't, so until they do, you're stuck with the license as is.
As for "meeting of minds" etc and exchange of value, that's irrelevant to the conditions of the license. It's not a contract. It usually starts off with something like "By using this software, you agree to the following terms...".
They were commonly called forced savings accounts when I was growing up. The standard advice was to buy a home as an investment vehicle. Every older family member giving me advice would preach about how they don’t make any more land and the price will only go up.
You can - to this day - talk until your are blue in the face to these people that your primary place of living is not an investment, but they will refuse to even entertain the idea even with the stark cold math staring at them in the face.
If these retired folks can’t sell their homes for a huge profit they will be in for some very difficult times a decade or two from now. They are highly motivated to keep the music playing as long as they can vote and show up to local city council meetings.
Renting means that your rent will typically stay the same in real terms, so increase each month, and indeed you might find your landlord decides to sell and suddenly you're homeless.
Most people in the UK, despite lifetime fixed interest mortgages being very rare, buy for stability, and to ensure they don't have to pay rent in later life. They might do an equity release as they are retired to give them more money, but that's certainly not the norm.
Now the buying of additional properties from the mid 90s was very profitable, house prices would increase far more than rental income, and you could leverage that, and some people (spurred by daytime tv shows) decided to buy a house, spend 100k doing it up, and selling for 150k more than they bought it, making a 50k profit. Had they not done it up they'ld likely have made more money, as the profit was caused by increasing house prices.
Certainly in the UK that was still a small part of the market.
The biggest leap was the move from the mid 90s to the mid 00s of house price:wage ratio from about 4-5:1 to around 7-8:1 as mortgage companies would lend more -- typically 4 times two incomes (in the 80s and 90s mortgage companies wouldn't lend that much).
Since then house prices have broadly remained locked to wages at a radio of 7:1. Its dropped to about 6.5 and gone up to about 8 over the last 20 years.