> the government later changed the rules

Did they, or was it found that they had ignored them and are now being forced to follow the law? Those state and local governments were so supportive that the processes for approvals and reviews was all done in secret and without necessary inputs. You know, the things the laws in those areas said you had to do.

In this particular project, it looks like Oracle and Blue Owl Capital singed the contract before state regulators reviewed and provided necessary approvals.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-mexico-regula...

And not seeking necessary regulatory approval doesn't really seem like things 'beyond their control.'

In that case, would the people caught unemployed and with upside down loans in the 2008 financial crisis would have a reasonable argument for "force majeure" to cancel their mortgages? ... After all, they had a reasonable expectation that the economy would continue to support their employment, either with their current employer or by finding a new job that paid just as well?

at some point the phrases loses its meaning if it becomes applicable to pretty much anything.

A hurricane wipes out your data center and someone sues you for it not being finished on time. Thats what force majeure is for.

You made a series of bad business decisions != force majeure.

As the AI bubble starts to pop we’re going to see a lot of creative claims as everyone rushes for the exits and the debt bomb behind all this infra lights off.

My recollection from law school is that force majeure is more like a specific subset of "impossibility of performance", which is to say it's not generally the same as "something outside a company's control."

I can’t see what the event that has caused a force majeure claim is, though local opposition is not unexpected in any infrastructure buildout - I would be surprised if that is permitted / accepted.

All the reporting is about delaying payments, not a good look, and definitely undermines the FM claim. FM generally speaking needs something truly in expected and outside of control - COVID / maybe a literal war in the region your a working in. Increased cost exposure and push back from local opposition would not clear the FM bar in my experience.

A reasonably-written contract would have weasel words in it - something like "subject to zoning approval, and approval of the needed power and water and etcetera". Oracle has very expensive lawyers; they should have had those clauses in there.

Still, you write those for the known possible obstacles. Having the state government change the ground rules may not have been one of your known possibles. So, yeah, I could see force majeure being at least possibly reasonable.

Reuters is reporting that it is due to difficulty getting power. Which, if correct, should have been a foreseeable risk.

"Force majeure is basically there for situations where something outside a company’s control prevents them from delivering on a contract."

More broadly, Force majeure refers to an act of God or such outside of human control.

It’s so well known that Oracle is such a hostile and predatory company, it’s sooo hard for me to look at this objectively.

There's zero reason why a company, who failed to account for regulatory risk, should be able to call that to avoid consequences.

We have to stop shielding and bailing out companies(ans banks) when their bet fails.

Maybe they should have negotiated legal deals from the get go?

No special rules for billionaires.

> I really don't get who keeps using Oracle

"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.

It's only relatively recently (in the lifespan of large companies) that OSS alternatives have come along that can do much more of what Oracle can do. Oracle was miraculous for a long time. It was also a huge pain to operate (source: I know people who've operated it), particularly in its RAC configuration, but if you could operate it you could run a bank and rely pretty well on Oracle being rock solid.

Oracle Database is still the gold standard for data in an enterprise setting. Postgres is great, but it doesn't have the clustering or replication capabilities, or support, that Oracle does.

When you're talking about business, the software itself doesn't really matter at all. Accountability is everything. There has to be a throat you can choke, an ass you can drag onto the carpet, when it fails. That is the reason why Oracle persists as an organization: they assume accountability for the data storage layer, freeing their clients to worry about other things.

This also has implications for developers grousing about "being an accountability sink" for AI-generated code. Being an accountability sink is the business and as Larry has demonstrated, quite lucrative indeed. Developing the code is a side effect that can now be done close to 100% by machine.

Oracle is more than Java and an RDBMS. You cannot throw a rock without hitting a Fortune 500 company running PeopleSoft and/or the Oracle ERP.

Government contracts, size and momentum, they're pretty famous for being ruthless on the upsell and counting licenses very carefully. They use their size to absorb other entities (like people soft who let the FBI's data go missing onto the dark web just recently [1]) they all uses databases and need datacenters. The government needs to manage big sets of data for whatever reason, Oracle is essential to that mission, bingo-bango too big to fail! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805278

I think all their recent layoffs show that nobody uses oracle, and the data centers for open ai are their last best hope for future revenue.

Nobody picks oracle anymore, and everybody who's using oracle wishes they were off it and is working on projects to detach themselves from paying oracle heaps of money for software that's no better than open source alternatives.

You don't have experience from corporate environment. Oracle is very much present, alive and kicking there, in 1000 and 1 little or big applications, sometimes even out of convenience and cost (is you have just 1 DBA team supporting oracle, adding even 1 postgres to production system could be a cost nightmare to support and manage.

And SQL DBs are not going anywhere in next few decades.

I’ve been on some teams where some SQL devs can do some non intuitive things with SQL (particularly some of the enterprise features from Oracle). Not saying they were the right decisions but I do think some processes get knitted to these enterprise features and it’s painful to walk back later

They get enterprise and government contracts because of kick-backs and revolving doors.

oracle's database is still a good product, with a lot of features that don't have analogs in open source db products. You can live without them, but still, it's a nice database.

My company uses Oracle BRM to bill for millions of phone calls each month. It would be such a crazy upheaval project to move from that.

> they removed JavaFX from the core of Java

You can still use OpenJFX with OpenJDK, can't you?

Oracle is a law business in the business of getting contracts from customers and then forcing the customers to pay money.

The substance of the contracts is an afterthought.

My friend you don’t understand the world of business..

Btw I hate oracle but they’ve got their business model down to a T.

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"No one could have predicted that permits and infrastructure necessary for this project's completion would be delayed". Except for every project that's needed permits and infrastructure ever.

I hope whoever buys Oracle fires Larry by email.

Force majeure can be defined within contracts. So if the contract said that force majeure included changes in law or failure to receive permits, then it's force majeure. There can also be a separate "change in law" provision.

One can't say whether it's valid or not without reading the actual contract and looking at the state's case law.

"Well a wave hit it"

'Force Majeure' is a good way to describe their incompetence.

Right, Oracle is at the bottom of the heap (they borrowed the most with the least initial credibility— who the fuck seriously thinks Oracle was ever going to be a major player in AI), so weakness in the market will appear with them first. But I think it will bubble its way up.

Since July

Still too high of a rating.

Bloom has always been gimmicky.

Interesting. I had been interpreting "it's too dangerous; make us slow down" as hype to get more investment and/or customers. "We don't have the money to build out" is an interesting alternate interpretation.

It costs about 4x to insure against Oracle’s credit risk as it does against a generic North American investment-grade issuer [1]. That divergence is almost entirely a product of 2026.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/82dbd39c-f8dd-4ef1-8a80-d430a2257...

It's easier to pay back the loans if they don't spend the money in the first place. This sounds like they can't spend the money, so paying it back should be easy, not hard.

How so? It's clear the hyperscalers can't keep up with demand.

Due to the difficulty of building and the time lead, there will be a multiple of applications for every data center that actually comes to fruition.

But if you're talking about the capital investment that's being talked about as too high, I would agree that it's way too high, as all these big tech breakthroughs result in too much building at first. Which hurts the builder's profitability but helps consumers.

When our spot instances go away and don't come back, that's a sign that there's not enough capacity.

There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.

Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.

Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.

The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.

Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.

The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.

Everything is going to be AI soon.

Reuters is paywalled now - sometimes. They use what they call a “dynamic paywall”, discussed here: https://digiday.com/media/how-reuters-dynamic-paywall-is-boo...

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What does it change exactly? It's not like gas or materials are going to get cheaper any time soon. It can burst for a whole lot of reasons, including the 2nd coming of Jesus or resources price... it's not like people have been calling AI ressource intensive for years right ?

Right, so the presumably the revenue projections aren't increasing at the same pace and the financials don't make sense anymore. Which is potentially a sign of the bubble bursting.