Oracle's $18B Project Jupiter debt trades below 90 cents as AI data center risk seeps into retail products
MatthewChang · x · 2026-10-09
Leyla Kunimoto traces the financing of Project Jupiter, Oracle's massive New Mexico AI data center campus:
- On Sep 24, Oracle sent a force majeure notice to the Blue Owl Capital developer over gas permitting tangles; $ORCL fell 3%+ that day and the $18B construction debt is already quoted below 90 cents on the dollar.
- Oracle's lease is "hell-or-high-water": it cannot be terminated and rent is due regardless of power, with force majeure able to delay full rent by up to three years.
- She warns that data center development debt and equity are showing up in retail-facing non-traded vehicles with opaque terms — the only guaranteed winners are developers and contractors.
- Quoting Matthew Chang: OpenAI's books are minus $20B and not yet PCOAB audited; he bets on a $20B revenue write-down at Anthropic. OpenAI voluntarily moving to real accounting suggests Sam Altman is getting ahead of the problem.
More from Venture
- Creator: going viral is now 50x harder, AI makes up ~50% of Shorts views — heyneighbor · 2026-10-09
- FT accused of conflating gross and net revenue in its OpenAI $20B shortfall story — firstadopter · 2026-10-09
- New podcast hits 5,000 subscribers in a month: human-made content still wins — oran_ge · 2026-10-09
- USV partners: NYC is poised to win as AI shifts to deployment era, citing Suno's biggest office — rebeccakaden · 2026-10-09
- Rebuild any e-commerce cart with Claude + Aftersell's copy-prompt workflow — EXM7777 · 2026-10-09
- AI inference to hit ~$350B by 2027, surpassing databases as software's biggest market — demian_ai · 2026-10-09