Force majeure is basically there for situations where something outside a company’s control prevents them from delivering on a contract.
I can see Oracle’s argument here. A number of states and local governments that were originally very supportive of new data centers, including places like Texas and Pennsylvania, have since started blocking or restricting new construction.
If Oracle signed these contracts and the government later changed the rules and have stopped those projects from moving forward, it’s hard to argue they should still be held to the same delivery commitments.
(That seems pretty close to the type of situation force majeure is meant for.)
Did they, or was it found that they had ignored them and are now being forced to follow the law? Those state and local governments were so supportive that the processes for approvals and reviews was all done in secret and without necessary inputs. You know, the things the laws in those areas said you had to do.
In this particular project, it looks like Oracle and Blue Owl Capital singed the contract before state regulators reviewed and provided necessary approvals.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-mexico-regula...
And not seeking necessary regulatory approval doesn't really seem like things 'beyond their control.'
at some point the phrases loses its meaning if it becomes applicable to pretty much anything.
In this situation, governments are now enacting new regulation that ban companies like Oracle from building data centers.
Still, you write those for the known possible obstacles. Having the state government change the ground rules may not have been one of your known possibles. So, yeah, I could see force majeure being at least possibly reasonable.
I hope whoever buys Oracle fires Larry by email.
I certainly hope not; you can't fire[1] someone via email.
============================
[1] Out of a canon. Into the sun.
One can't say whether it's valid or not without reading the actual contract and looking at the state's case law.
I'm assuming this is a reference to the classic Clarke and Dawe skit:
Take Java as a solid example, they removed JavaFX from the core of Java, which made everyone think JavaFX was dead, recently they started providing enterprise support for JavaFX, which signals its production ready, but, who wants to trust Oracle? I sure don't. I can use C# for free without any of that baggage, and if I get all sorts of stable options for a GUI, and with Avalonia (and Uno?) I can run my GUI on any OS.
> "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...
Apparently this one would have been the largest SOFC installation, by far.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/oracle-cite...
https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/vie...
If Oracle was able to build the data center under-cost and faster than expected, that would be a better sign the bubble was bursting!
How profitable a datacenter is, is kind of irrelevant to the convo, if you are unable to power it due to material shortages.
"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.
When you're talking about business, the software itself doesn't really matter at all. Accountability is everything. There has to be a throat you can choke, an ass you can drag onto the carpet, when it fails. That is the reason why Oracle persists as an organization: they assume accountability for the data storage layer, freeing their clients to worry about other things.
You can still use OpenJFX with OpenJDK, can't you?
Btw I hate oracle but they’ve got their business model down to a T.
And SQL DBs are not going anywhere in next few decades.
They are using tiny fractions of the data centres they claim to have "built".
There's a significant risk of a Chinese real-estate bubble here.
But if you're talking about the capital investment that's being talked about as too high, I would agree that it's way too high, as all these big tech breakthroughs result in too much building at first. Which hurts the builder's profitability but helps consumers.
There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.
Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.
Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.
The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.
Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.
The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.
Everything is going to be AI soon.
If your take on the abilities of AI is correct, we aren't talking about upending the status quo, we're talking about an ELE for the human race.
It isn't irrelevant, because they have to make money to be built. The debt for these projects was already issued, so you have to pay the coupons. If Oracle doesn't pay the developer is gonna suffer on their end.
The money doesn't seem to back this up. Why would Anthropic pay through the nose and make such desperate moves for compute?
That's pretty consistent with them having not been able to get the physical data centre capacity they have supposedly had built actually online, I think?
More to the point, Anthropic appears to mostly be capable of serving its customers, doesn't it? It's not so resource-starved that people aren't able to use it at all.
So what does it tell you that only 300 megawatts was enough to make a very meaningful difference to that?
If Anthropic's fortunes can be meaningfully changed by only 300MW which allowed them to uncap their customers, what is the case — even including OpenAI and Google -- for the demand for the 23GW of unbuilt AI data centre build commitments out there?
If there's that much demand, how did 300MW have such a radical impact on such a popular, widely used product?
Satya Nadella himself said there will be some oversupply.
What if there is actually lots of oversupply?
My instinct is that the internet/software/IT industry sees its own demand for Anthropic and OpenAI and is misleading itself into thinking that this is representative of the demand in the rest of the industry, when what possible other human industry tasks are there that match the compute demands of writing software?
Another way to look at it: if the general demand for AI compute is so insatiable, how in this world of existing insatiable demand did xAI have spare capacity to lease? Why does Meta have spare capacity to lease?
The issue here is very evidently one of allocation. But allocation tends to get solved over time. That could leave quite a lot of very big data centres relatively empty.
What's being talked about is a massive extension of human capability, into the intellectual sphere rather than the physical environment. The atom bomb had a clear way to get to extinction, a sudden chain reaction that leads to collapse of the entire biome.
The only way AI gets there is something like control of the nuclear weapons on all sides and that control becoming suicidal. Every other major event leads to at most civilization collapse, after which I assume we will have some sort of Butlerian Jihad restrictions on getting into the same situation.
But, I would love to know what I'm missing here, if ELE has clearer routes!!
Not the way I was thinking off; I was thinking more along the lines of brain atrophy until humans are helpless (maybe 2 complete generations of humans).
And that's a short extinction; the KT extinction took place over thousands of years. If, 1000 years from now, we are finally at the place described in "The Machine Stops", only then will an observer be able to decide that we don't have the necessary critical mass of intelligent humans anymore.
Humans got to be the apex predator simply on intelligence alone. It's possible that without thinking ability we'd go extinct.
Crazy times.
so the argument is even stronger than for oracle.
Govt’s are waiting for this stuff to mature and shake out. USA can’t be trusted anymore.