Hajra Naz
OpenAI has confirmed that it is the company behind Oracle’s massive $30 billion-per-year cloud deal. The Wall Street Journal first reported this on Monday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later confirmed the news in a post on X and through a company blog—though he did not mention the exact dollar amount.
To recap: On June 30, Oracle filed an SEC report saying it had signed a cloud contract worth $30 billion annually. At the time, Oracle didn’t reveal who the client was. The announcement drove Oracle’s stock to an all-time high. It even made Oracle founder Larry Ellison the second-richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.
Many speculated about who could need $30 billion worth of cloud services each year. For context, Oracle earned a total of $24.5 billion from all its cloud customers combined in its 2025 fiscal year.
Now we know—it’s OpenAI.
OpenAI says the deal is for 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity. This is part of the massive Stargate project, a $500 billion plan to build next-generation AI data centers. The project was announced earlier this year by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. However, the $30 billion contract is only between OpenAI and Oracle. SoftBank is not involved in this particular deal.
To give you an idea of scale, 4.5 gigawatts is about the same as two Hoover Dams. That’s enough power to serve around four million homes.
But this won’t be easy money for Oracle. The data centers still have to be built—and that’s going to cost a lot in both time and energy. Construction will begin at the Stargate I site in Abilene, Texas.
In the meantime, Oracle is spending big. CEO Safra Catz revealed that the company spent $21.2 billion on capital expenditures last year and expects to spend another $25 billion this year. That’s nearly $50 billion in just two years—mainly for building data centers, not including land costs. These investments support both OpenAI and Oracle’s other customers.
One more key detail: OpenAI recently said it reached $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, up from $5.5 billion the year before. This Oracle deal alone is triple that. And that’s before you add in OpenAI’s other costs, including its existing data center commitments.
