Oracle posted not-so-good quarterly results that fell short of Wall Street’s revenue expectations. Soon a report by Bloomberg claimed that the tech giant has postponed the completion dates for some of the massive data centres it is developing for artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, pushing back timelines from 2027 to 2028. However, an Oracle spokesperson clarified that there has been no delays in meeting contractual commitments.“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC, in response to a Bloomberg report which claimed delay in construction due to a shortage of labor and materials.“There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track,” the spokesperson added. The Oracle spokesperson, however, did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. The Bloomberg report pointed out that even with the delays, the remaining schedules for these US sites, which are slated to be among the largest data centers globally, are still considered ambitious.The development is part of a $300 billion contract signed earlier this year, under which Oracle is tasked with supplying the immense computing power necessary to train and run the ChatGPT-maker’s sophisticated AI models.
Oracle stock declines and project status
Following the news, Oracle’s shares dropped by 4%, as per CNBC. Despite the reported setbacks on some sites, Oracle Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk offered an optimistic outlook on delivery during an earnings call this week. “We have ambitious achievable goals for capacity delivery worldwide,” Magouyrk said. He confirmed that the first data centre being developed for OpenAI, located in Abilene, Texas, remains on track, with over 96,000 Nvidia Corp. chips already delivered.
