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Premium: How OpenAI Kills Oracle
Ed Zitron<br>Apr 24, 2026<br>37 min read
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Soundtrack — Brass Against — Karma Police<br>It was January 21, 2025. Per The Information, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, had just flown to Washington DC from Florida, and had to borrow a coat “...so he wouldn’t freeze during an interview he did on the White House lawn, according to two people who were involved in the event.” He was there to announce a very big — some might even say huge — new project standing next to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.<br>“Together, these world-leading technology giants are announcing the formation of Stargate, so put that name down in your books, because I think you’re gonna hear a lot about it in the future. A new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI infrastructure in the United States and very, very quickly, moving very rapidly, creating over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately,” said President Donald Trump.<br>After he was done, Ellison stepped to the podium. “The data centers are actually under construction, the first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building’s a half a million square feet, there are ten buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20.”<br>Following Ellison, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son added that Stargate would “...immediately start deploying $100 billion dollars, with the goal of making $500 billion dollars within [the] next four years, within your town!” turning to Donald Trump with his hands extended. It was unclear what town he was referring to.<br>Altman added that it would be “an exciting project” and that “...we’ll be able to do all the wonderful things that these guys talked about, but the fact that we get to do this in the United States is I think wonderful,” though it’s unclear what “the wonderful things” or “this” refers to.<br>It’s been 15 months, and Stargate LLC has never been formed. SoftBank and OpenAI have contributed no capital to the project, other than SoftBank’s own acquisition of a former electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio that it intends to turn into a data center parts manufacturing plant with Foxconn, which is best known for effectively abandoning a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin back in 2021. Oh, and Project Freebird, a SoftBank-built project that exists to funnel money to its subsidiary SB Energy, though I can’t imagine how SoftBank actually funds it.<br>No government money was ever involved, no funding ever left anyone’s bank account, no "initiative" ever existed, and OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank have, in my opinion, conspired to mislead the general public about the existence and validity of a project for marketing purposes.<br>The “data centers actually under construction” referred to a 1.2GW project in Abilene Texas that had been under construction since the middle of 2024, and had originally been earmarked by Elon Musk and xAI, except Musk pulled out because he felt that Oracle was moving too slow. While Ellison said that there were ten buildings under construction with plans to expand to twenty, only eight were actually being built (each holding around 50,000 GB200 GPUs across NVL72 racks), with the extension up in the air until March 2026, when Microsoft agreed to lease 700MW — so another seven buildings — that were meant to go to OpenAI. These buildings will not make Oracle any money, as Oracle is, despite spending so much money, leasing whatever land it uses from Crusoe.<br>Sidenote : Previously-unknown information from the Wall Street Journal published this week shows that the reason why Microsoft ended up buying the additional capacity at Abilene was because lenders were uncomfortable with providing additional funding to provide compute that was ultimately destined to go to Oracle.<br>As far as those eight buildings go, only two are actually online and generating revenue, though sources with direct knowledge of Oracle’s infrastructure have informed me that work is still being done on both buildings despite CNBC reporting that they were “operational” in September 2025.<br>Let’s break this down. Based on a presentation by landowner Lancium from May 2025, the Stargate Abilene campus was meant to have 1.2GW of AI data centers online by year-end 2025.<br>Based on reporting from DatacenterDynamics, the first 200MW of power was meant to be energized “in 2025.” As time dragged on, occupancy was meant to begin in the first half of 2025, had “potential to reach 1GW by 2025,” complete all 1.2GW of capacity by mid-2026, be energized by mid-2026, have 64,000 GPUs by the end of 2026, as of September 30, 2025 had “two buildings live,” and as of December 12, 2025, Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyurk said that Abilene was “on track” with “more than 96,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 delivered,” otherwise known as two buildings’ worth of GPUs.<br>Four months later on April 22, 2026, Oracle tweeted that “...in...