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.
mynti 19 hours ago [-]
The tech has always been mature enough but simply too expensive. But since combustion engines are sold out for the next years, data centers are rushing to get anything they can. So the extra millions for power generation will be a rounding error
dfedbeef 17 hours ago [-]
I would think someone would have run those numbers first.
red-iron-pine 14 hours ago [-]
someone did, determined it would make them look bad, and pawned the assignment off to a junior executive to take the blame.
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.
augment_me 15 hours ago [-]
If the numbers dont add up it's fucked anyways who cares just send it
Also worst comes to worst government will have to bail them out to not cause massive unrest
lazide 16 hours ago [-]
No time to think, go go go.
MengerSponge 16 hours ago [-]
You would think, right?
onlyrealcuzzo 19 hours ago [-]
Electricity is about 3% of their total operating cost, so, yes.
FuriouslyAdrift 18 hours ago [-]
Energy is the largest OPEX by far (70-80%)... taxes second.
That's if you don't count hardware amortization - which is 80% of the cost...
FuriouslyAdrift 14 hours ago [-]
That's not OPEX, that's CAPEX and tangible assets are depreicated not amortized.
cyanydeez 18 hours ago [-]
Anyone who puts a local model on a GPU understands how much heat they produce.
Its amusing watching cloud AI users struggle to grasp even direct impacts of their use.
fedecaccia 18 hours ago [-]
The cost of electricity is (almost) negligible compared to the cost of having GPUs sitting idle. Electricity from fuel cells can be twice as expensive, but even then, it represents only about an extra ~15% of the amortization cost associated with keeping the GPU hardware idle.
simiones 17 hours ago [-]
That's not an operating cost, it's capital cost.
chorizo 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, but given the 3-5 year lifespan of the server infra capex, the separation becomes less meaningful. Better to count the entire TCO or discounted cashflow accounting for the rapid asset depreciation.
hylaride 18 hours ago [-]
There is no way it's 3% if they're getting electricity from the grid, even if they get their cooling from somewhere else (eg lake/river water or outside air in winter). Median DCs are anywhere from 25-40% (depending on the jurisdiction's electricity costs and how much cooling they need). Hypercaler datacenters tend to be even more dense than the median traditional ones.
pjc50 19 hours ago [-]
That seems surprising - source? What's the other 97%? Does this include ops staff?
simon-b 19 hours ago [-]
I saw a breakdown (don't have on hand sorry) where server depreciation was by far the majority. Power was the largest cash opex, probably matching your intuition.
nomorewords 19 hours ago [-]
Without having done any research at this point I would assume it's mostly the amortized cost of hardware - GPUs, memory etc
pjc50 19 hours ago [-]
That's capex not opex!
doikor 19 hours ago [-]
The stuff inside the buildings (servers, switches, storage, cooling, etc) basically the stuff using the electricity and salaries/sub contractors (in addition to some techs handling the servers think security, cleaning, storage management, receiving shipments of new hardware, etc). Some taxes (depends a lot where)
walthamstow 19 hours ago [-]
Electricity is only 3% of opex for a data centre?
Zigurd 17 hours ago [-]
As far as I can tell Bloom has a working product, but I also couldn't find any examples of Bloom installations that are within two orders of magnitude of the New Mexico data center.
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.
arijun 20 hours ago [-]
I thought fuel cells were an energy storage system, not an energy generation system. Surely it’s cheaper to just connect the data center to the generation directly (either by upgrading the grid to handle it or building generators nearby).
peri-cl 20 hours ago [-]
Fuel cells are an electricity generation method. They oxidize fuels (methane, hydrogen) at low temperature, electrochemically, without combustion—going directly from fuel to electrons.
This would have been simply a natural gas power plant, of a different type.
m4rtink 19 hours ago [-]
I'm really wondering about the air filtering needed for this to work. Gas turbines are already quite sensitive to bigger particles in the air but for the fuel cell membranes, this could be a much harder problem.
throwaway173738 19 hours ago [-]
I bet you could spin the natural gas in a centrifuge to eliminate larger particles.
m4rtink 17 hours ago [-]
I would guess the natural gas is quite purified by that point, but for the fuel cell to work you need to combine it with air (or to be precise, the oxygen in the air) and a lot of it. So for the fuel cell membranes not to clog with dust and gunk they will have to clean in in some way to prevent issues, ideally without to much extra-energy use or expense per unit of air filtered.
amluto 12 hours ago [-]
How about a HEPA or ULPA filter? These are very mature technology, work extremely well, and are not particularly expensive.
numpad0 19 hours ago [-]
Most fuel cells can't be recharged. They take combustible gases, re-assemble the molecules in the gas into H2O or something chemically stable, and release the energy delta as voltage potentials. The cells work purely as catalysts. Only the fuels are expended.
It's just a type of battery, that takes fuel, as its refillable energy source. Weird but it works.
smallerize 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, there is a completely different thing with the same name. Race cars can use fuel cells to prevent sloshing. Those are basically fuel tanks with foam in them.
19 hours ago [-]
notatoad 20 hours ago [-]
That was not my understanding. Unless this installation was supposed to be producing fuel on site somehow, fuel cells are a mechanism for turning fuel into electricity.
The literally dirty secret is that a Bloom fuel cell is a device for turning methane into hydrogen on demand to fuel a hydrogen fuel cell. It's still emits CO2 and oxides of nitrogen like a gas turbine. They should be a lot quieter though.
dghlsakjg 18 hours ago [-]
In Motorsport a gas tank is called a fuel cell. That may be where the confusion lies
trebligdivad 18 hours ago [-]
Oh that's a fun use - I'd heard some data centres were using fuel cells/mains-gas as a back up power source but using it as main power is interesting.
thinkcontext 19 hours ago [-]
They can be resold, they have great value for anyone wanting to provide their own power to a DC. Demand is so high they might be able to make a profit.
486sx33 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
runeks 21 hours ago [-]
> The tech group has issued a force majeure notice related to the power supply to the project developer, a unit of Blue Owl Capital, after the site ran into permitting delays after rising local opposition.
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?
dgellow 21 hours ago [-]
Oracle is in a pretty bad situation, it’s a desperate move. Their debt is rated just above junk since July. They are completely over leveraged. There is a reason the share price has been trending down so much
athrowaway3z 21 hours ago [-]
Its funny how before Oracle got in everybody was guessing who'd be swimming most naked when the tide goes out. CoreWeave obviously, but OpenAI likely as well depending on whom you'd ask.
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.
dgellow 21 hours ago [-]
I had that exact thought when SoftBank got involved :)
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
The whole thing is amazing, but it gets even better on page 45.
ungreased0675 16 hours ago [-]
It’s hard to believe that’s not a parody.
merelydev 15 hours ago [-]
How much to get your own domain like that?
MandieD 12 hours ago [-]
Custom top-level domain? About $200k to even apply, plus about $50k/year, if I recall correctly.
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
Roughly $600k these days, after fees. Just need 59 friends to put in $10k, or 599 friends to each put in $1k!
m4rkuskk 15 hours ago [-]
Embarrassing to provide this AI slop to investors.
dam_jackalopes 16 hours ago [-]
lol. Thanks for this. GOOSE VALUE!
chorizo 16 hours ago [-]
Eggs do not lay eggs. The goose was not valued.
be8e9dmrro 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
Russia is being bombed by the country they chose to invade.
iso1631 20 hours ago [-]
wtf are you on about?
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.
jeltz 20 hours ago [-]
What makes to possible collapse of Oracle worse is that they have an actual business too that is currently getting cannibalized to feed the AI projects. If coreweave fails that is bad but oracle failing will be worse.
peri-cl 17 hours ago [-]
They can't prioritize everything. They are called ORacle—not ANDacle
mitxela 17 hours ago [-]
by De Morgan's law though they are NOT AND NOTacle.
17 hours ago [-]
Daishiman 11 hours ago [-]
Best dad joke I've read on HN
blendo 17 hours ago [-]
:-)
lotsofpulp 19 hours ago [-]
Oracle failing will be a blessing for anyone not working at Oracle.
rm_-rf_slash 16 hours ago [-]
Peoplesoft and its consequences have been a disaster for the modern workforce
Back when I worked at a university, writing ETL scripts for Peoplesoft felt like I was carrying buckets of data by hand.
chicken-stew 19 hours ago [-]
Does that jeopardise the Warner Bros deal?
15 hours ago [-]
Cpoll 21 hours ago [-]
> he's old.
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.
dgellow 21 hours ago [-]
s/healthy/alive/
adrianN 21 hours ago [-]
Even a billionaire doesn’t have many _good_ years left after 80.
It’ll likely just give him some new kind of cancer.
Iolaum 20 hours ago [-]
not yet anyway
gehsty 19 hours ago [-]
Failing to get a permit is not an act of god, having to pay even when the site does t have power is poor milestone / payment planning. Also it’s quite hard to request payment if the thing you are buying is not working (appreciate this quite complex here), but if the people who are delivering the data center are responsible for delivering the power, it feels like oracle would be within reason to not pay?
bitexploder 16 hours ago [-]
Ellison has more or less lived his entire life running Oracle (and his personal finances) completely over-leveraged, skating just barely ahead of disaster. I don't see this ending any way other than SV picking apart its bones for pennies on the dollar.
surgical_fire 21 hours ago [-]
We have to account for the fact that Oracle is a law firm with a software branch attached to it.
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.
brookst 20 hours ago [-]
And there’s a good chance of inappropriate protective action from the US government.
cyanydeez 18 hours ago [-]
Trumps blessing basically equivelent to stating AI is large scale fraud. Thats essentially what it means when he praises things: either he expects fraud or is congratulating.
briffle 18 hours ago [-]
Great to know that everyone's RAM, GPU, and SSD costs have skyrocketed over the last year, so that companies like Oracle can fill giant buildings full of RAM and SSD's (and GPU's) and then not even be able to turn them on..
DarkNova6 17 hours ago [-]
That's the decentralized nature of capitalism working as intended. Distributing resources in the most efficient way possible. Thank you invisible hand.
bunderbunder 17 hours ago [-]
Ironically, Adam Smith himself spent plenty of time worrying about the risk that allowing wealth to concentrate and an oligarchy to form would undermine the invisible hand. Much of what he was responding to was English society's tendency toward extremely rich people and organizations (e.g., the East India Company) hoarding resources on a mass scale, to the detriment of everyone else. So what's happening with AI right now is very much the antithesis of the free market he envisioned.
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.
tavavex 12 hours ago [-]
It's shocking to me that he was aware of it and yet considered it an unrelated defect that can be individually corrected, and not a flaw that blows the entire idea wide open. To me it seems that this outcome was unavoidable and that this is the equilibrium his system will settle into earlier or later. Opposing the concentration of power is harder than making it happen. Even strong regulations only need to spring one leak somewhere for them to get in and get the ball slowly rolling. It's a ratchet. If he knew about this, then his ideology was like boarding an already slowly sinking ship and hoping someone would just keep scooping out the water and throwing it overboard at a sufficient pace forever.
Daishiman 11 hours ago [-]
> It's shocking to me that he was aware of it and yet considered it an unrelated defect that can be individually corrected, and not a flaw that blows the entire idea wide open.
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.
bunderbunder 9 hours ago [-]
He was arguably also right insofar as the slippery slope that he warned about is pretty much exactly the slippery slope that we slid down. And I can’t really blame him for the fact that most Adam Smith fanboys don’t seem to have read the second half of his book.
fapjacks 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
27183 17 hours ago [-]
It works out pretty well for the RAM, GPU, and SSD manufacturers
A too-big-to-fail about to fail certain it'll be bailed out? Another comment* raised a question about investments in fuel cells that could have been just for show. Are they doing max damage to leech as much cash as possible before implosion or it's just... I mean, it's oracle it's a mystery to me how they make so much money with selling crapware, so it might just be business as usual?
Oracle's business model is to get government contracts. It's a whole special business model unrelated to software.
gchamonlive 20 hours ago [-]
Makes sense and it shows
philipallstar 20 hours ago [-]
I don't love Oracle, but they made so much money selling the best relational database on the planet for 40 years.
nylonstrung 20 hours ago [-]
We must have extremely different definitions of what constitutes "best" or even "good"
joshstrange 17 hours ago [-]
> best relational database
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.
amluto 12 hours ago [-]
In maybe 2004 I developed a small application using Python and Oracle. It was miserable. Admittedly I paid all the little costs (figuring out how to connect in the first place, waiting many seconds for the client library to initialize itself, etc) and got no benefits whatsoever from scale. Even back then, MySQL would have been far better, and early-2000s-MySQL was pretty bad.
I’ve heard that at least the Oracle client is not as bad these days.
27183 17 hours ago [-]
With software products you can pretty reliably tell they're dogshit when the sales team targets the C suite. The security industry is riddled with that. Deals done over steak dinners and yacht charters don't translate to working, reliable software.
gchamonlive 20 hours ago [-]
OracleDB, MongoDB and PHP over IIS natively on a single Windows machine running on Azure. Delicious.
pepperoni_pizza 19 hours ago [-]
I've lost count how many "cloud-native application deployed on Azure" at my job have turned out to be this. Installed by random contractors who have since left of course.
gchamonlive 19 hours ago [-]
It's easy to deploy grief and call it a day if you aren't the one cleaning up afterwards. On the other hand the blaming mentality never led anyone anywhere so I'm not really sure how one is to address this.
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"
catchnear4321 20 hours ago [-]
please don’t trigger my ptsd like that, thanks
gchamonlive 19 hours ago [-]
HN despertely needs a collapsible "spoilers" section in the comments
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.
scrlk 18 hours ago [-]
> there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything
> 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.
My favorite bug of the .Net connector is how the entire API supports async operations, but the underlying implementation can't tell two different executions of the same query apart, so it's random whether each call will get their own results or some other ones.
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.)
jiggawatts 6 hours ago [-]
> the underlying implementation can't tell two different executions of the same query apart
Got a reference for that?
hobo123 20 hours ago [-]
That should just be illegal. The right to measure or to publish things is not about their software, it's a personal right, so Obstacle shouldn't be able to remove your right in their license agreement.
rswail 17 hours ago [-]
The copyright that Oracle has entitles it to offer a license with the conditions it wants. They've had that condition in their license for decades.
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.
JsonDemWitOster 19 hours ago [-]
What an honor for Professor De Witt (no relation to my handle).
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.
rswail 17 hours ago [-]
It's their copyright, they get to decide the conditions in the license if you want to use their software.
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.
onraglanroad 15 hours ago [-]
Only to the point it doesn't infringe on your statutory rights.
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.
gchamonlive 14 hours ago [-]
There's freedom of speech missing somewhere in this, I guess, maybe, not sure where, just a hunch
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
The First Amendment doesn't prevent the government from enforcing contracts between private parties who have agreed not to speak.
gchamonlive 14 hours ago [-]
There's still freedom of speech missing somewhere in this... it seems reasonable to me if we were talking about two businesses, but to prevent a john doe to publish benchmark results? Pardon me but that sounds a lot like corporate-sponsored state-backed censorship. Quite ironic considering Oracle is US-based.
rswail 2 hours ago [-]
If you're john doe, you have exactly the same standing as a business when agreeing to and complying with the conditions of the license from a copyright owner.
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.
gchamonlive 17 hours ago [-]
That doesn't address the question of the limits of what should be enforceable in an EULA
rswail 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed, but that isn't what we're discussing.
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.
jiggawatts 6 hours ago [-]
> agree to it to use the software
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.
rswail 2 hours ago [-]
I fully agree with you that governments should pass laws that restrict the rights of a copyright holder on what they are allowed to control by licensing.
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...".
rblatz 15 hours ago [-]
What does the right to freedom of speech have to do with your contract with Oracle?
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.
gchamonlive 19 hours ago [-]
To be fair with Oracle, every software has it's idiosyncrasies and for many corporations the devil you know wins every time. The problem starts when new projects start adopting such a hopeless stack.
JsonDemWitOster 19 hours ago [-]
Uh, it's only the "best" in the same sense that Windows Server is the best server infra on the planet. And arguably Windows has some network bandwagon effect behind its momentum: when your workstation supplier supplies machines with Windows pre-installed and you have built an IT Support Team with the expertise for Windows technologies, it only makes sense to also use Windows in your server.
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.
cmiles74 13 hours ago [-]
Could this be a sign of the end of the AI bubble?
jpster 18 hours ago [-]
I thought force majeure is for weather catastrophes, natural disasters, terrorism, “acts of God”. Not for “we didn’t get the permits”.
jasomill 14 hours ago [-]
You'd have to read the contract.
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.
hn3ufz62f7 21 hours ago [-]
Agreed, and most of these leases explicitly carve permitting out of force majeure since it's the tenant's job to get them.
throwaway173738 19 hours ago [-]
Feasibility and resource availability are your first job before you buy land or break ground. For houses the bank requires at least a certificate of water availability from a utility or an evaluation of the feasibility of drilling a well.
Havoc 19 hours ago [-]
Oracle is on the hook for god damn everything. If AI implodes they'll be a smoking crater
stingraycharles 19 hours ago [-]
Can’t say I really feel bad about that prospect.
Quitschquat 16 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they'll be bailed out by the federal administration using your money.
19 hours ago [-]
cmiles8 20 hours ago [-]
The AI bubble has built a giant interconnected web of commitments backed by a debt bomb. It all flows back to the ability of net new cash to flow in to pay for all this, not just VC funding and circular vendor financing. We’re seeing the early signs of that starting to all implode.
jmyeet 18 hours ago [-]
This is going to separate the wheat from the chaff in regards to who can negotiate a contract and who can't.
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.
Yes. But even with these SPVs is was largely about keeping the liabilities off the hyperscalers balance sheets. GAAP has some rules being exploited there on keeping commitments off the balance sheets until they’re delivered. But the big players are still very exposed. The WSJ recently reported there’s are 3 trillion in these little gems hiding “off the books” that will start popping up as real liability soon. It’s a huge mess.
mitxela 16 hours ago [-]
We've been seeing early signs for 3 years. How long does it take?
PLenz 20 hours ago [-]
When new money pays old that's a ponzie scheme
cmiles8 20 hours ago [-]
In an actual Ponzi scheme yes. The AI bubble isn’t a Ponzi scheme. Infra investment ahead of revenue is fairly standard in tech and not inherently bad. However if the revenue to pay for all that infra doesn’t materialize then you have a bubble implosion. Right now while the revenue and growth numbers for AI revenue would be incredibly impressive by most standards, there’re still a drop in the bucket relative to what’s needed to stop this whole house of cards from crashing down.
mitxela 20 hours ago [-]
You're calling the stock market a Ponzi scheme?
nrclark 19 hours ago [-]
As currently practiced, yes. Non-dividend non-voting shares might as well be pokemon cards. Their only real value lies in getting somebody else to buy them, and new money has to flow in from the outside. The question isn't "will it collapse?", it's "when?"
marcosdumay 18 hours ago [-]
AFAIK, US stocks pay back mostly as buy-backs.
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.
cmiles8 19 hours ago [-]
By your logic buying a house is a Ponzi scheme too.
edgyquant 19 hours ago [-]
Houses have real value by themselves as you can live in one. But they have been treated like a Ponzi scheme recently which is why we are in such a mess with housing
gspr 19 hours ago [-]
My god, this is the most HN comment of the day. You do know that most normal people buy a house not to resell it at profit, but to have a place to live, right?
phil21 15 hours ago [-]
It’s almost always both. Basically every single retired person I know in my family or friends of family are relying on their home to be their primary asset/income in retirement. It’s always a much larger chunk of their net worth than any retirement savings, if they even have the latter.
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.
mitxela 18 hours ago [-]
I think most house buyers are buying it for resale value.
lazide 16 hours ago [-]
Depends on the year and the current market mania level. A lot of buying in ‘05-‘07 was crazy speculative for profit.
iso1631 4 hours ago [-]
The US is pretty unique in that mortgages are typically fixed for the length of the loan, which means the monthly outgoing is guaranteed to go down in real terms due to inflation
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.
cmiles8 18 hours ago [-]
The point is it has value and can be resold later to get your capital back. Housing tends to be a mediocre investment at best but folks do generally expect to be able to get their capital back when selling.
jackb4040 16 hours ago [-]
Damn did not expect to see that username this morning. Shouldn't you be soldering flipdot panels?
lotsofpulp 19 hours ago [-]
Most developed countries are ponzi schemes, since they all have old age benefits where new people pay old people.
bithammerthunde 16 hours ago [-]
Oh the schadenfreude. Oracle sipping it's own medicine.
"Oracle said force majeure notices did not establish a project delay or change delivery expectations."
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?)
cmiles74 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe they think investors will accept this and let these fees slide in the hopes that the AI bubble can be milked for a little longer.
be8e9dmrro 20 hours ago [-]
You can put solar and wind everywhere. I would sue god if there is no sunshine at night!
mitxela 20 hours ago [-]
Or just pause training at night
iso1631 4 hours ago [-]
The bulk of the cost is the machines, not the power.
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
htrp 17 hours ago [-]
Overview Energy would like a word. Any resemblance to James Bond villains is entirely coincidental.
>Overview Energy makes satellites that beam solar energy to Earth.
> "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.
Also worst comes to worst government will have to bail them out to not cause massive unrest
https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown
Its amusing watching cloud AI users struggle to grasp even direct impacts of their use.
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.
It's just a type of battery, that takes fuel, as its refillable energy source. Weird but it works.
https://www.bloomenergy.com/technology/
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?
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.
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.
Back when I worked at a university, writing ETL scripts for Peoplesoft felt like I was carrying buckets of data by hand.
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.
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842884
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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...".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?)
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.