OpenAI agreed to pay Oracle $30B a year for data center services

OpenAI was the company that signed a $30 billion per year deal with Oracle for data center services, disclosed last month, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed the details of the contract (but not the dollar amount) in an X post on Tuesday and in a company blog post.

To recap, on June 30, Oracle disclosed in an SEC filing that it had signed a cloud deal that would generate $30 billion a year in revenue. However, the company didn’t say who it was with or for what services. The news caused Oracle’s stock to hit an all-time high, making its founder and CTO, Larry Ellison, the second richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.

Speculation on the identity of the customer ensued as people wondered what company could possibly need a fresh $30 billion a year in data center services. For comparison, Oracle collectively sold $24.5 billion worth of cloud services in its fiscal 2025 to all customers combined, it reported in June.

OpenAI has now explained that this Oracle deal is for 4.5 gigawatts of capacity as part of Stargate, the $500 billion data-center-building project OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced in January. (Apparently, the $30 billion deal does not involve SoftBank.)

The WSJ reports 4.5 gigawatts is the equivalent of two Hoover Dams, enough power for about four million homes.

This isn’t a straightforward win for Oracle. OpenAI and Oracle still have to build this monster data center, which will be a costly endeavor, both in cash and in energy. They are doing so at what OpenAI called the Stargate I site in Abilene, Texas. 

Meanwhile, Oracle spent $21.2 billion on capital expenditures in its last fiscal year, CEO Safra Catz reported in June, and it expects to spend another $25 billion this year, she said. So, nearly $50 billion, largely spent on data centers (and that doesn’t include land purchases, she said) in two years. Although, to be clear, that money also supports Oracle’s existing customers, in addition to OpenAI’s demands.

One final interesting part to note about all of this: Last month, Altman said that OpenAI recently hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, up from around $5.5 billion last year. This single commitment to Oracle is already triple per year what it is currently bringing in and doesn’t include all of the company’s other expenses, including its current data center commitments.