This weekend, Openai and Oracle shocked the markets with a surprise $ 300 billion, five -year agreementPart of a wave of new activities that feels the provider of the stars’s cloud provider. But perhaps the markets should not have been caught by surprise. The agreement recalls that, despite Oracle’s Legacy State, the company still plays an important role in artificial intelligence infrastructures.

On the Openi side, agriculture was more revealing than the lack of details suggested. For one, the startup will have so much to pay so much for suppliers of a startup appetite measurement, even if it is not clear where Power’s electricity has said the calculation coming or how it will pay for it.

Chirag Dekate, vice -president of the Gartner research company, told Techcrunch that it is clear why both sides were interested in this agreement. It makes sense to work with different infrastructure suppliers, naked. It also diversifies the company’s infrastructure, spreading the risk between different cloud suppliers – and offers Openi a downsizing announcement also with respect to competitors.

“Openai seems to put together one of the supercuting bases to the most inclusive for the extreme scale, the downsizing of the inference where appropriate,” said Dekate. “This is so unique. This is probably exemplary of how a model ecosystem should appear.”

Some observers of the sector expressly surprise that Oracle has been involved, citing the reduced role of the company in the AI ​​boom with respect to cloud rivals such as Google, Microsoft Azure and AWS. But Dekate claims that the observers should not be so surprising: Oracle has already worked with Iperscaler and provides the infrastructure for the considerable US business of Tiktok.

“Over the decades, they have again built basic infrastructure capacity that have made it possible to offer scale and extreme performance as a fundamental part of their cloud infrastructure,” said Dekate.

Payment and power

But in the stock market market celebrates the agreement, there are no key details and the questions surround the power and payment.

Openi has made a series of investment investment ads in the last year, each with a amazing price. Openi has committed himself to spending about $ 60 billion a year for the calculation from Oracle e $ 10 billion To develop chips to customized personalized.

In the meantime, Openii said in June that he hit $ 10 billion of recurring annual revenuesCompared to about $ 5.5 billion last year. This figure includes returned from the company’s consumption product, the chatgpt company products and its bees. And while his CEO Sam Altman was He painted a rosy picture of his future perspectives In terms of subscribers, products and revenue, the company burns every year billion dollars in cash.

Power is another question, or more specific in which companies provide to obtain the energy necessary to perform this level of calculation.

The Observerse sector has provided a short -term push for natural gas, however Solar and batteries They are probably better positioned to offer energy before and a lower cost in many markets. Technological companies are also Betting big on nuclear power.

Despite the securities of the market market, the energy impact of the early growth of Openai is not entirely without edge. Data centers are expected to consume 14% of all electricity in the United States by 2040, according to a postponement The Rhodium group published yesterday.

The calculation has always been a constraint for artificial intelligence companies, so much so that investors have Thousands of nvidia chips branch To ensure that their startups have access to the energy they need. Andreessen Horowitz reported that he has purchased over 20,000 GPUs, while Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross rented access to 4,000 GPU clusters (although perhaps Meta owns it now).

But the calculation is useless without power. To ensure that their data centers remain squeezed, large technological companies have triggered Solar farmspurchase Nuclear power plantsand the ink deals Geothermal startups.

So far, Openii has been relatively silent on that front. CEO Sam Altman placed several prominent bets in the energy sector, including Oklo,, HelionAND ExowattBut the company itself has thrown money into space such as Google, Meta or Amazon.

With a 4.5 gigawatt calculation agreement, this may soon change.

The company can play an indirect role, paying Oracle to manage the physical infrastructure – something with which it has a vast experience – just like Altman invests in startups in line with the future needs of Openi’s power. This will leave the company “Light Asset Light”, something that will undoubtedly please its investors and help to maintain its evaluation in line with other startups to focus on software and not with Legacy technological companies, which are burdened by expensive infrastructures.