OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed that his company is behind the staggering $30 billion-a-year data center deal Oracle disclosed in June, ending weeks of speculation over the mysterious client that sent Oracle’s stock to record highs.
The confirmation came via Altman’s post on X and was followed up with a blog post detailing OpenAI’s growing infrastructure ambitions under its Stargate initiative.
In an SEC filing on June 30, Oracle reported a cloud deal expected to generate $30 billion in annual revenue but did not name the client. The scale of the agreement puzzled observers, as it alone exceeds the $24.5 billion Oracle generated from all of its cloud customers in fiscal 2025. The Wall Street Journal revealed on Monday that the client in question is OpenAI, a claim that Altman has now validated.
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The deal will see Oracle provide 4.5 gigawatts of capacity—equivalent to two Hoover Dams’ worth of power—dedicated to supporting OpenAI’s artificial intelligence workloads. The capacity will be used to build one of the world’s largest data centers under a $500 billion project known as Stargate, originally announced in January 2025. The facility, dubbed Stargate I, is under construction in Abilene, Texas, and is being jointly developed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. However, the $30 billion contract itself does not involve SoftBank.
In its own announcement, Oracle said the facility will span multiple hyperscale data centers across the U.S., supporting OpenAI’s highly compute-intensive model training and deployment workloads.
“Oracle’s unique ability to deliver mission-critical AI infrastructure at a global scale makes them an essential partner,” said Altman.
The Stargate project marks a major milestone in OpenAI’s ambition to lead the artificial general intelligence (AGI) race. The facility’s scale is unprecedented—it will use more power than any single data center complex ever built and is estimated to serve roughly four million homes in equivalent energy terms.
Yet this is not a straightforward win for Oracle. The construction and operation of such a massive facility come with enormous financial and logistical challenges. Oracle CEO Safra Catz disclosed in June that the company spent $21.2 billion on capital expenditures in the previous fiscal year and plans to spend another $25 billion this year—primarily on data centers. These investments are not solely for OpenAI; they also serve Oracle’s broader customer base, which includes large enterprise clients and government agencies.
Even more striking is the scale of OpenAI’s financial commitment relative to its own revenue. Altman recently disclosed that OpenAI had reached $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, nearly doubling from $5.5 billion a year earlier. That means the Oracle deal alone is triple OpenAI’s current revenue, not counting its existing cloud service costs, ongoing model training expenses, and other operational overheads.
The aggressive infrastructure build-out suggests OpenAI is betting heavily on a future where demand for its AI systems will scale exponentially—and soon.
The broader implications of this deal ripple far beyond Oracle and OpenAI. With cloud computing and AI workloads putting increasing pressure on data center infrastructure, utilities and local governments are now grappling with energy demands previously unimaginable in the tech sector. The 4.5 GW capacity required for Stargate is not just a technical feat; it’s a geopolitical and environmental flashpoint in the making.
Altman, who has long championed OpenAI’s vision of safe and beneficial AGI, hinted that the partnership will form the computational backbone of its next-generation AI systems.
“The infrastructure we are building with Oracle will power the models of tomorrow,” he said. “It’s the scale we need to safely push forward.”
Meanwhile, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison—now the world’s second richest man according to Bloomberg—has framed the deal as a validation of Oracle’s strategy to dominate enterprise cloud AI.
“We are building a generational platform for the AI era,” Ellison said. “And OpenAI will be at its center.”
In the short term, the deal is expected to reshape not just Oracle’s cloud portfolio, but also the entire data center industry. As hyperscalers scramble to keep up with AI’s rising computational demands, OpenAI’s megadeal with Oracle may be just the first in a series of similarly audacious infrastructure plays.