The NewYorkTimes.com reported that in January 2025 “Ellison’s database software and cloud computing company, Oracle, and its partners — most prominently OpenAI — were going to invest as much as $500 billion over the next four years into a group of sprawling data centers, 500,000 square feet each, that would produce 10 gigawatts of computing power, using enough energy to power as many as 10 million homes.” The July 31, 2026 article entitled “Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/larry-ellison-ai-oracle.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share) included these comment from Reporters Jonathan Mahler, Jim Rutenberg, and Kirsten Grind:
For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom.
These efforts had sometimes put Ellison at odds with the Biden administration, which took a more cautious approach to artificial intelligence, rolling out a host of regulations designed to give the government some control over its development. Biden’s team believed that the best way to maintain America’s lead in the A.I. race was to control the ability of U.S. companies to provide computing power to foreign nations like China and the autocratic regimes of the Persian Gulf.
Anyone surprised?