> "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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy
I was surprised to read we're already building fuel cell power plants on this scale (this is a first of its kind project—by far this startup's largest customer). I didn't realize the tech was that mature. Now I'm left wondering if they actually ever intended to, or whether this was some kind of circular financial-engineering vaporware.
I think this was motivated by a mixture of greenwashing and financial shenanigans. That much gas turbine capacity has a leadtime of several years now. Nobody knows if Bloom can scale up to match the requirements. I'd bet against it just because the consumables and operations of the Bloom fuel cells is pretty complex and pushing the limits in terms of heat and other parameters.
Its amusing watching cloud AI users struggle to grasp even direct impacts of their use.
This would have been simply a natural gas power plant, of a different type.
It's just a type of battery, that takes fuel, as its refillable energy source. Weird but it works.
Since when can failing to get a permit be considered force majeure?
Doesn't majeure specifically denote something large scale and out of anyone's control, such as a hurricane?
With the contracts that "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" jumped on its without a doubt Oracle going down second if not first.
He's just gambling because he's old and feeling bold.
It’s like if I see the EU announce a large investment in AI, always makes me nervous given how we are often late to the party
https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investor...
The whole thing is amazing, but it gets even better on page 45.
There's certainly been some small attacks in the EU+ caused by Russia, and many more attributed to Russia, and of course Ukraine, which is not in the EU and never has been, is bombing Russian cities in retaliation for the massive invasion and continued occupation Russia launched some years ago.
He's only 82, and he's got a billion-dollar nonprofit dedicated to keeping him healthy. Don't count on him being on the way out.
Investors who (rightfully) see this "force majeure" claim as bullshit will have to drag Oracle through court, and Oracle probably counts on this taking years to get settled.
Hard disagree. Oracle's database will always live in my mind as a complete waste of money. Some con-man, I'm sorry salesman, sold a previous (idiot) executive on it at a previous company I worked for. The exec was long gone and lots of time was wasted trying to adapt our application (that used MySQL) over to Oracle until we finally pulled the plug. But not after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on time and equipment. We re-purposed the hardware into effectively a big NAS.
AFAICT the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS DBs is vendor support and the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS vendors like Percona is a ginormous marketing budget. I'm always grimused when I see Oracle product placement in the MCU.
My guess would be the cause is unreasonable corporate pressure for productivity, so if this is the case the natural answer would be to give people more time to think about architecture, create incentives for group studies and laboratories and remove incentives that lead to the so called "résumé-driven development"
Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.
Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!
This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.
The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.
Back in 2018, a former Oracle developer explained what it was like working on Oracle DB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
> Here is how the life of an Oracle Database developer is:
> - Start working on a new bug.
> - Spend two weeks trying to understand the 20 different flags that interact in mysterious ways to cause this bag.
> - Add one more flag to handle the new special scenario. Add a few more lines of code that checks this flag and works around the problematic situation and avoids the bug.
> - Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.
> - Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.
> - Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.
> - Add a few more flags in an attempt to fix the issue. Submit the changes again for testing. Wait another 20 to 30 hours.
> - Rinse and repeat for another two weeks until you get the mysterious incantation of the combination of flags right.
Seems like their comment is still valid today.
But polluting the poll with unusable connections is just Oracle copying the MS-SQL's thing. The C# recommended coding practices will automatically deal with this. (Not that you would want to follow them, but you may want to look and copy this part.)
You are not forced to accept them.
Back in the late 90s, Oracle RDBMS was the "won't get fired for buying" RDBMS. It's been downhill ever since. Once Postgres got partitions, it was over.
Oracle still had a market for high availability clusters for a while, but the increasing performance of single servers and SANs and finally cloud services made that redundant.
So Oracle have spent the last 20 years being bastards about licensing, squeezing their existing customers while the customers do their best to migrate somewhere else.
My handle notwithstanding, I'm smart enough to not take legal advice from HN but nonetheless I cannot stop myself hence the rhetorical question: how is a EULA clause like that even enforceable? If this isn't going against freedom of speech then this surely it's against some consumer protection laws?
The cynical answer to that I guess is "a lot of money funding a legal team the size of a warlord's militia" and also "lobbying" but even then it doesn't track to me that this clause could have even that much of an effect as a scare tactic?
The EULA is enforceable because you have to agree to it to use the software, and Oracle has large and well financed legal team who will descend from a great height on you and anyone who publishes the results of you doing performance testing.
The big tech companies have typically used Special Purpose Vehicles ("SPVs") [1] for their hyperscalar investments and there's a lot of insulation from financial woes. Here's an example structure:
1. One subsidiary (or SPV) builds the physical building the data center is in. That's all it does;
2. The main SPV will lease the building from (1). It borrows a bunch of money for the GPUs and other hardware.
So, done right, if a hyperscalar fails, the company only loses the hardware.
Has Oracle done this correctly or have they screwed up and the debtholders have rights to Oracle itself in the case of a default?
The bigger issue for the economy is similar to 2008. There is so much AI debt that it's impossible to avoid. Mutual funds, pension funds, retirement accounts, etc will all be exposed to it so you can get a cascading economic collapse.
[1]: https://www.ernestchiang.com/en/posts/2025/off-balance-sheet...
The fact that those are so few relative to what dividends would be is a measure of the market's (lack of) health. But it doesn't automatically make the market a Ponzi scheme.
>Overview Energy makes satellites that beam solar energy to Earth.