Public company
Borrows to build AI capacity. The cost of insuring its debt widened sharply through 2026 on those borrowings, on market pricing relayed by financial press rather than any filing or rating agency.
$638B contracted backlog
· 5 min
MLCommons published MLPerf Inference v6.1 with a record 30 submitting organisations and, for the first time, a test of AI agents doing multi-step work such as coding.
· 6 min
Two suppliers detailed their own share of a four-supplier deal a trade publication puts above 1.7 gigawatts. The part that matters is that none of it is new construction.
· 6 min
A quarterly filing shows the promise of future AI revenue growing much faster than the cash on hand to build the data centres behind it.
· L1 Power and land · ~$300 million · Confirmed
We Energies and Oracle agreed on a deal meant to save the utility's Wisconsin customers about $300 million in fuel costs tied to the Point Beach nuclear plant. The agreement is not yet final, it still needs to go to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission for review in the coming months. Oracle is building a large data center in the state as part of its 'Project Lighthouse' development. If regulators approve it, the deal means Oracle, rather than ordinary ratepayers, absorbs more of the cost increase tied to powering the grid the data center relies on.
· L3 Iron and cloud · 30 orgs (record); DeepSeek R1 best per chip 5.7x in a year · Confirmed
MLCommons published results for MLPerf Inference v6.1 on 16 September, its industry-standard, peer-reviewed benchmark of how fast AI systems run, with a record 30 organisations submitting, including Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, CoreWeave, Nebius and Lambda. For the first time it includes a test of AI agents: the Edge Agentic Inference test, which measures multi-turn work such as agentic coding, where each step depends on the ones before. MLCommons says the best per-chip result on its visual-language test improved 2.99 times in six months, and on the DeepSeek R1 reasoning test 5.7 times in a year. For people using AI tools, MLCommons says gains like these could let the same systems serve more users.
Read the story: MLPerf, the AI industry's standard speed test, adds its first test of AI agents as a record 30 organisations take part · Nvidia · Lambda · Oracle · Microsoft Azure · CoreWeave · Nebius
· L1 Power and land · up to 568 MW from ENGIE · Confirmed
ENGIE said on 17 September that, through a portfolio of wind energy resources serving the ERCOT market, it will help supply up to 568 megawatts of renewable electricity for Oracle's Texas operations. Other suppliers announced their own shares of Oracle's Texas wind buying separately, and this item's story brings those documents together. For people in Texas, it is one large buyer of computing locking in power from wind for its operations there.
Read the story: Oracle buys a gigawatt of Texas wind that is already built and already connected · Oracle
· Band Money · No shares sold under the cancelled plan · Confirmed
Oracle disclosed in a filing that Larry Ellison, the company's executive chair and chief technology officer, has cancelled a pre-arranged plan to sell Oracle stock. The filing says no shares were sold under that plan before it was cancelled, and that Ellison has no other plans in place to sell Oracle stock. These trading plans let executives sell shares on a schedule set in advance, so cancelling one without having sold anything under it says something about an insider's own intentions rather than being a sale in itself. For anyone who owns Oracle stock, or is watching the company's finances as it borrows to build AI computing capacity, this is a small concrete data point about what the company's largest individual shareholder is doing with his own shares, not a change to the business.
· L3 Iron and cloud · 850 MW, 300,000+ GPUs · Confirmed
Oracle's quarterly earnings release says the company delivered 850 megawatts of additional data centre capacity and more than 300,000 GPUs, the specialised chips that run AI, to its cloud customers in the three months to August 2026. Oracle describes the quarter's delivery as almost triple the capacity it delivered in the preceding quarter. The same release carries the 664 billion dollar order backlog already on this site, so this is the first look at how fast that backlog is turning into working capacity rather than signed promises. The figures are Oracle's own; no outside party has confirmed them. Nothing changes for most people today; this is a disclosure about construction pace, not a price or a product.
· L3 Iron and cloud · $664bn RPO, up $209bn year over year · Confirmed
Oracle, the database and cloud company that has signed some of the largest AI computing contracts in the industry, said its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue, rose to $664 billion in the quarter that ended 31 August, up $209 billion from a year earlier. RPO is a promise from customers to pay Oracle later, not cash Oracle has today. To build the data centres behind those contracts, Oracle spent $28.5 billion on capital equipment in the quarter, more than its entire $19.3 billion of revenue, and its free cash flow was negative $5.4 billion, the sixth straight quarter it has gone the wrong way. Oracle says it still expects at least $90 billion in total revenue for the fiscal year. For anyone who owns Oracle stock or bonds, or lends to companies like it, this quarter is the plainest evidence yet that Oracle's own AI buildout is being financed by borrowing and prepayment against future revenue, not by cash already in hand.
Read the story: Oracle's cloud backlog hits $664 billion, and the company is burning cash to build it · Oracle
· Band Money · $489B · Reported
Goldman Sachs counted 489 billion dollars of AI-related debt issued in 2026 up to late July. That is borrowed money, not spent money. It has to be paid back whether or not the demand it was raised to serve turns up.
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