Oracle and OpenAI Bailed on Texas. Here Are My Unfiltered Thoughts Okay so I saw this on Thursday and kept meaning to write something about...
Oracle and OpenAI Bailed on Texas. Here Are My Unfiltered Thoughts
Okay so I saw this on Thursday and kept meaning to write something about it and now it's Monday and I'm doing it between deploys so bear with me.
Oracle and OpenAI killed the 600MW expansion at their Abilene Stargate campus. Not the whole project the core campus is still going, the broader $500B initiative is still a thing just this specific expansion that would've been enormous. The reported reasons are financing got complicated and OpenAI's "needs shifted." Which, honestly, "our needs shifted" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That's the kind of thing you say when you don't want to say the real thing.
The Weirdest Part: Nvidia's Real Estate Play
The part I keep thinking about is Nvidia apparently cutting a deposit check specifically to hold the site so Meta can move in and the explicit goal there being to keep AMD out of that facility. That's wild to me. The chip wars are so heated right now that a hardware company is pre-paying for real estate it doesn't even want, just to control who gets to deploy on it. Nvidia is not playing checkers.
Anyway.
Meanwhile, Down in the API Trenches
We've been doing more AI integration work lately mostly OpenAI API stuff baked into MERN stack apps for clients, some Anthropic, a bit of Bedrock and the API cost conversations are getting more interesting. Not bad-interesting yet, but the kind of interesting where you start caching aggressively and second-guessing every streaming call. Our AWS bill has a whole new line item shape compared to two years ago. I don't really have a point here, it's just on my mind.
The part that actually matters for people building on this stack is that the core Abilene campus and the broader Stargate roadmap are intact. The expansion didn't happen, but the foundation is still there. So if you're worried that this signals some kind of OpenAI infrastructure pullback, the reporting doesn't really support that read.
The "shifting needs" angle is interesting though. If you read between the lines a bit, OpenAI has been moving fast enough that their own capacity planning can't keep up which is either a great problem to have or a concerning sign of how chaotically they're operating internally, depending on your priors about that company.
Okay my build just finished.
