The Wall Street Journal published a report on Monday that OpenAI had signed a $30 billion contract with Oracle per year for data center services. The deal was disclosed last month. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed the details (but not dollar amount) of the contract in an X Post and a blog post on Tuesday.
To summarize, on June 30, Oracle disclosed that in an SEC filing ( ) that it had signed a deal with a cloud provider that would generate revenue of $30 billion per year. The company did not specify who the deal was with or what services it was for. Oracle’s stock rose to an all-time record high after the news, Bloomberg reported. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CTO, became the second richest man in the world.
People speculated on the identity of the customer, wondering what company would need to spend $30 billion annually on data center services. Oracle reported that it sold $24.5 billion in cloud services to all its customers in fiscal 2025.
OpenAI now explains that this Oracle deal was for 4.5 gigawatts as part of Stargate – the $500 billion data center-building project OpenAI announced with Oracle and SoftBank in January. SoftBank is not involved in the $30 billion deal.
According to the WSJ, 4.5 gigawatts are equivalent to two Hoover Dams and can power about four million homes.
It’s not a simple win for Oracle. OpenAI and Oracle will still have to build the monster data center. This will be a costly undertaking, both in terms of cash and energy. OpenAI is building the Stargate I data center in Abilene Texas.
Oracle spent $21.2 Billion on capital expenditures during its last fiscal year. CEO Safra catz reported this in Juneand they expect to spend another $25 Billion this year. In two years, Oracle has spent nearly $50 billion on data centers, and that’s not including land purchases. This money is also used to support Oracle’s existing clients, as well as OpenAI’s needs.October 27-29, 2025
One final interesting part to note about all of this: Last month, Altman said that OpenAI recently hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, up from around $5.5 billion last year. This commitment to Oracle represents a triple of what the company is currently bringing in per year. It does not include all other expenses or its data center commitments.
