Hyperscale Cloud (IaaS / PaaS)

Oracle Corporation has issued a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, its New Mexico AI data center campus, which includes Bloom Energy Corporation's largest single fuel-cell deployment covering up to 2.45 gigawatts within a project expected to involve up to $165 billion of investment over its life. The notice is a financial protection against regulatory delays intended to defer payments if the data center is not operational by 2028, not an indication that Oracle is leaving the project as a tenant, and Oracle told Bloomberg it remains fully committed to New Mexico. Project Jupiter has already faced permitting hurdles, including the New Mexico State Land Office's rejection of pipeline permits in March and again in July, which led Oracle to replace gas turbines with Bloom fuel cells earlier this year. Bloom Energy's exposure is significant and concentrated, as Jupiter represents its single largest deployment within roughly 25 gigawatts of total pipeline visibility, and debt linked to the project has been trading below 90 cents on the dollar. Bloom Energy said its equipment is fungible and can be deployed elsewhere if Jupiter is delayed, while Oracle carries about $89 billion more debt than cash and depends on projects like Jupiter opening on time to support growth that jumps to between 35% and 43% a year.

Oracle and We Energies announced a nuclear power subscription deal on October 2, 2026, under which Oracle will take 10-20% of the output from the Point Beach Nuclear Plant, or 125-250 megawatts, for the $15 billion Lighthouse Campus AI data center in Port Washington, Wisconsin. The campus, co-developed by Oracle, OpenAI, and Vantage Data Centers as part of the broader Stargate initiative, is designed to house close to 1 gigawatt of AI capacity within a 1.3 gigawatt total electrical footprint, with completion targeted for 2028. Oracle has committed to fully funding the energy costs for its portion, and the deal is the primary driver of a proposed $176 million electric rate hike for We Energies customers in 2027, accounting for roughly 20% of that increase, while the utility projects the arrangement will save customers approximately $300 million in fuel costs between 2027 and 2033. The subscription, a first-of-its-kind model in Wisconsin, requires approval from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, which is weighing whether to require tech companies to cover 100% of new power plant costs. The deal is part of an industry-wide pivot in which Big Tech has contracted over 10 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the United States over the past year, including Microsoft's 20-year power purchase agreement for the 835-megawatt restart of Three Mile Island, Amazon's acquisition of a nuclear-adjacent Pennsylvania campus for over $650 million and its $500 million investment in X-energy small modular reactors, and Google's order of 500 megawatts from Kairos Power. Data center power demand reached 29.6 gigawatts by late 2025, equivalent to the peak demand of New York state, and the International Energy Agency projects it will rise by 130% by 2030, even as U.S. nuclear output stayed largely flat between 2020 and 2025 and no small modular reactors are under construction in the country.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers. The statement came in a blog post in which Garman pushed back against widespread suspicion of data centers, noting that more than 100 data center moratoriums are currently being considered across the United States after New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers. Garman argued that direct data center water consumption accounts for only 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, and that where energy rates are rising it is primarily because the grid is old and has not been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived. He also said data center generators are idle 99.9% of the time, running roughly 10 hours per year, and that Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which it has a meaningful data center presence over the past three years. Critics remain unconvinced, with an independent watchdog recently blaming data centers for a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid.

Larry Ellison's dual role as backer of Paramount Skydance Corp. and controlling shareholder of Oracle Corp. is stirring concern on Wall Street as both companies pile on debt. Paramount took on $52 billion of additional debt this week to help pay for its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., while Oracle has nearly doubled its long-term debt to more than $160 billion over the past two years as it builds out AI computing capacity, making it the fifth-largest borrower in the US corporate bond market. The cost to insure the debt of both companies against default has converged and is increasingly moving in lock-step, a sign investors are beginning to treat the two credits as intertwined. Ellison, 82, is backstopping Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros., spearheaded by his son David, via a family trust that guaranteed a significant portion of the roughly $47 billion of equity financing for the deal, and the family pledged to take all necessary steps to bring leverage down in the coming years. His fortune has plummeted by almost $200 billion over the past year, though he is still worth roughly $192 billion, and he recently canceled a plan to sell billions of dollars worth of Oracle stock and disclosed he had increased the number of shares pledged as collateral for personal loans. S&P cut Oracle to BBB- in July and lowered Paramount's issuer credit rating to BB last month, and Oracle shares have fallen more than 50% over the past year.

Nscale has hired Justin Osofsky, a long-term executive at Meta Platforms, to be its chief operating officer to drive rapid expansion at the AI infrastructure company ahead of its upcoming IPO, Bloomberg News reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. Osofsky, who served Meta for 18 years in various capacities and was most recently its chief partnerships officer, will report to Nscale CEO Josh Payne and lead the company's global operations. A slate of Meta veterans, including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, already serve Nscale, a neo-cloud operator that rents out computing power to AI developers; Sandberg, who sits on the company's board, helped hire Nick Clegg, the Facebook operator's former head of global affairs, and Fidji Simo, a former OpenAI executive. In September, the London-based data center operator filed for a U.S. IPO, an offering expected to raise as much as $3B, Bloomberg previously reported. Meta announced the resignation in an internal post, with Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan noting that Osofsky had brought sound judgment and steady leadership that will outlast his time here.

The central fair value estimate for Nebius Group has been lowered to US$283.58 from US$312.67, reflecting more cautious Street research that weighs enthusiasm for the company's AI-focused cloud infrastructure against concerns over valuation, capital needs and execution risk. The revision came alongside adjustments to the underlying model assumptions: the revenue growth assumption moved from 181.88% to 179.89%, the net profit margin input from 7.91% to 6.96%, the future P/E multiple from 57.25x to 59.17x, and the discount rate from 8.63% to 8.73%. On the bullish side, William Blair described Nebius as not just another neocloud, citing infrastructure scale, software capabilities and major customer relationships, while Buy and Outperform ratings from Goldman Sachs, Citi, BofA, Baird, Truist, Northland, Freedom Capital and BNP Paribas carried price targets in some cases above US$300, and above US$400 and US$390 for Northland and BNP Paribas respectively. On the bearish side, Rothschild & Co Redburn initiated coverage with a Sell rating and a US$84 price target, questioning whether equity markets fully reflect leverage and off-balance-sheet commitments tied to AI infrastructure, while Piper Sandler and BTG Pactual sat at Neutral with price targets in the low US$200s, flagging a more balanced risk and reward profile including earlier concerns around the Vineland data center and comparisons with peer CoreWeave.

Microsoft generated $182.94 billion of fiscal 2026 operating cash flow and paid $115.95 billion for property and equipment, leaving $66.99 billion of simple free cash flow that covered its $26.45 billion annual dividend about 2.5 times. After dividends, roughly $40.54 billion remained before repurchases and other claims, and $22.27 billion of buybacks used part of that balance. In the fiscal fourth quarter, management reported $41 billion of capital expenditure including finance leases, compared with $35.8 billion of cash equipment spending, with the separately reported $5.6 billion finance-lease component creating future obligations rather than immediate cash outlays. Holding operating cash flow at $182.94 billion, an additional $20 billion of cash equipment spending would cut simple free cash flow to $46.99 billion and still leave roughly 1.8 times dividend coverage, while an additional $40 billion would leave $26.99 billion, close to the dividend bill before buybacks. At September 30's approximate $3.81 trillion market capitalization, the payout was less than 1% of equity value, and fiscal 2026 simple free cash flow implies approximately 57 times free cash flow. Insider Monkey's hedge fund database showed 273 Microsoft holders in Q2 2026, compared with 282 in Q1, with Fisher Asset Management increasing its share position 3% to 26,611,728.

Amazon is planning to shift $8 billion worth of Nvidia AI chips off its balance sheet, according to the Financial Times, by creating a special-purpose vehicle that would own the chips and lease them back to the company. Outside investors would be able to buy into that special-purpose vehicle, a structure the report notes is becoming increasingly common among hyperscalers, though Amazon's move is unusual because it already owns the chips, whereas some competitors made such structured chip investments off balance sheet from the start. The model has drawn pushback, most notably from long-term bear Ed Citrone, who called it the dodgiest and most desperate thing he has seen in the bubble so far. Critics argue the main drawback is reduced transparency, since off-balance-sheet treatment obscures financial commitments and leaves unclear who holds the risk and who is owed what and when. The hosts noted that the debt holders in the special-purpose vehicle, not Amazon, would ultimately bear that risk, though the identity of those buyers is not yet known because the deal has not been done.

On the evening of September 30, ST Dou Shen (300010) disclosed that its wholly owned subsidiary Dou Shen Hong Kong recently signed a Cloud Computing Service Agreement with a certain customer, with a total contract value of about 119 million US dollars, equivalent to about 800 million yuan. The service period of the agreement is 60 months, and the customer will prepay 40 percent of the total order amount as agreed and pay service fees monthly. ST Dou Shen did not disclose specific customer information, stating that the contract involves confidentiality clauses and that it has completed internal procedures for exemption from disclosure of confidential information. The company said the contract is a large-scale computing power service project for the implementation of its intelligent computing service business, an important practice in cultivating a second growth curve, and reflects the extension of its business from AI applications to the computing power infrastructure field. Wind data shows that since mid-August 2026, ST Dou Shen's stock price has risen by more than 120 percent cumulatively.

Google Cloud generated $24.77 billion of second-quarter revenue and $8.81 billion of operating income, an approximately 35.6% margin, with revenue growing 82% from a year earlier, according to an Insider Monkey analysis of Alphabet's valuation. Annualizing that quarter gives $35.26 billion of operating profit, which the analysis treats as a recent pace rather than a full-year forecast. At hypothetical multiples of 20, 30 and 40 times that operating-profit pace, Cloud would account for about $705 billion, $1.06 trillion and $1.41 trillion of enterprise value, leaving approximately $3.39 trillion, $3.03 trillion and $2.68 trillion of Alphabet's $4.09 trillion enterprise value for the remaining businesses, corporate costs and nonoperating assets. Alphabet's consolidated second-quarter operating income was $40.77 billion; removing Cloud's $8.81 billion leaves $31.96 billion, or a mechanically annualized $127.82 billion, implying roughly 26.5, 23.7 and 21 times that residual operating-profit pace before a separate investment-asset adjustment. The analysis warns that a lower Cloud margin changes the calculation quickly: at the same $24.77 billion quarterly revenue, a 25% margin would generate about $6.19 billion of quarterly operating profit, or $24.77 billion annualized, and at 30 times would imply about $743 billion of Cloud value, roughly $315 billion below the 35.6%-margin scenario and almost 8% of Alphabet's current enterprise value.

PaleBlueDot AI has closed a $200 million Series C financing led by ComputeCore at a valuation of $3.2 billion. The round follows the Silicon Valley company's $150 million Series B announced in January, with existing shareholder B Capital participating alongside other global investors. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Palo Alto, PaleBlueDot AI operates a Super Intelligence Infrastructure Platform combining self-owned GPU clusters, a GPU marketplace and serverless inference, and its B300 cluster in Japan recently earned NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status. As of the end of September 2026, the company had signed over $5 billion in customer contracts, with customers from the U.S. and Japan together accounting for more than half of monthly revenue. Proceeds from the Series C will fund additional Super Intelligence compute capacity, and CEO Stephen Watts said the company will broaden its customer base with a focus on frontier labs, Neolabs and enterprises in the U.S. while investing in its full-stack and go-to-market teams.

Oracle shares reversed an early gain and turned lower Thursday after the Financial Times reported that Tencent Holdings had locked in a five-year lease spanning several Oracle data centers across Southeast Asia. Under the reported terms, Tencent would gain access to about 100,000 cutting-edge AI chips it otherwise can't obtain inside China, with the arrangement said to be worth roughly $7 billion and close to a third of that due upfront. Neither company responded when asked to confirm the details. Oracle stock had jumped nearly 2% before Thursday's opening bell on the report, but the shares gave up that advance amid overall market weakness and were down 0.82% at $136.18 at the time of publication. The deal reflects a broader scramble among Chinese tech firms for overseas computing capacity as domestic chip supply stays tight and U.S. export restrictions persist.

Oracle and STACK Infrastructure said Wednesday that no critical infrastructure was damaged at the Project Jupiter campus after flooding reached the site in southern New Mexico, and the project remains on its planned schedule. The two companies said they are working with partners and insurers to address site impacts. Oracle shares slipped about 5% last Thursday after news that the company sent a force majeure notice tied to its New Mexico data center project to protect itself from higher expenses. Project Jupiter is designed to have 2.45 gigawatts of capacity and is part of the broader Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure effort involving Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank, with about 20 banks providing an $18B loan to help finance the data center campus. The facility is expected to use Bloom Energy fuel cells.

Logizard's June 2026 fiscal year saw revenue rise 11.9% year on year to 2,436 million yen, while net profit grew 6.7% to 302 million yen, setting a record high. Its core cloud services expanded steadily, and development and implementation services, which had lagged in the first half, rebounded in the fourth quarter to drive double-digit revenue growth. Monthly recurring revenue came to 168 million yen, up 13.2% from a year earlier, and has continued to post record growth rates since the second quarter. For the June 2027 fiscal year, revenue is forecast to rise 15.3% to 2,808 million yen, while net profit is expected to fall 4.6% to 288 million yen as upfront investment in the new Bit Waybill business gets fully under way. The company has positioned the three years from the June 2027 fiscal year through the June 2029 fiscal year as an investment phase, and aims for revenue of 3,113 million yen and operating profit of 539 million yen in the June 2028 fiscal year.

CoreWeave unveiled Forge, a unified AI development environment, at its Fully Connected AI cloud conference. The company also introduced the CoreWeave Partner Network, featuring validated technology integrations aimed at enterprise and advanced AI users, and expanded its compute lineup by adding the NVIDIA Vera CPU to support emerging AI agent workloads. CoreWeave runs cloud infrastructure for AI developers and enterprises, and the launch sequence signals how the US-based provider is trying to pull more of the AI build process onto its own stack. The company said the clearest test of the strategy will be future disclosures tying Forge and the Partner Network to measurable backlog or workload share, such as updated figures on how much of its contracted AI capacity is running through Forge-driven workflows in quarterly updates through 2027.

GMI Cloud has raised $668 million in new financing, comprising $223 million in equity for its Series B round and a $445 million credit facility led by CTBC. The Series B was led by ARCHIV, a San Francisco investment firm specializing in AI and robotics, with participation from NVIDIA and Asia-Pacific investors including DSC Investment, Trend Micro, KB Investment, Kyobo Life and KT Corporation. The growth capital will fund capacity expansion in the United States, Taiwan and the rest of APAC, building on the company's Taiwan AI Factory and its Japan sovereign AI initiative, and will also support its inference services and strategic hiring. GMI Cloud said its contracted ARR has reached more than 9x its year-end 2025 level, while live ARR in production has grown more than 4.5x over the same period, and its inference platform now processes approximately 4 trillion tokens per week. Customers include Fireworks, Higgsfield, Nous Research, OpenRouter, Reflection, Cartesia, Trend Micro and Utopai Studios.

Oracle unveiled Fusion Claw, a governed agentic execution runtime that powers 25 new AI-driven enterprise applications along with new financial-crime compliance tools designed to automate complex workflows while preserving tight governance and auditability. The launch, disclosed in late September 2026, highlights Oracle's push to blend AI reasoning with deterministic enterprise computation, aiming to make "systems of outcomes" a core layer of its business software rather than just adding AI features at the edges. Fusion Claw is Oracle's attempt to turn AI into governed, auditable systems embedded in core ERP, finance, HR, and compliance workflows, strengthening the product story behind its aggressive pivot into AI infrastructure and agentic applications. Near-term catalysts remain OCI growth, conversion of Oracle's very large cloud backlog, and evidence that AI-driven Fusion apps can deepen wallet share, though the stock's sharp pullback and recent concerns around Project Jupiter and Wisconsin power delays have made funding, execution, and balance sheet risk more central to the narrative. Twenty Simply Wall St Community members see Oracle's fair value anywhere from about US$125 to nearly US$390, a spread that sits alongside mounting concerns about AI data center delays and funding.

Alibaba ramped up its artificial intelligence spending sharply in the June 2026 quarter, reporting RMB67.7 billion in capital expenditures, up 75% year over year, driven by AI infrastructure, higher CPU-compute capacity and rising chip-component prices. The outlay is part of a RMB380 billion three-year capital investment plan, of which RMB190 billion had already been spent by the end of the June quarter. The spending weighed on cash generation, with free cash flow deepening to an outflow of RMB44.7 billion from an RMB18.8 billion outflow a year earlier, while adjusted EBITA fell 30% and net income declined 75%. Early monetization offered an offset, as AI Cloud and Compute Services revenues rose 45% to RMB48.4 billion and adjusted EBITA for that business jumped 133% to RMB5.6 billion, and Alibaba expects AI-related capital expenditure to break even in roughly three years. The company carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell), and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its fiscal 2027 EPS stands at $6.41, down from estimates issued 30 and 60 days ago but still implying 64.78% growth from the prior year.