Dive Brief:
- Austin, Texas-based computer technology company Oracle plans to spend about $10 billion in 2025 on data center expansion, its CEO Safra Catz said Monday during the company’s third quarter earnings call.
- Interest in the firm’s cloud network is “extraordinarily high” and data center facilities are receiving a tremendous amount of demand, Larry Ellison, company chairman and chief technology officer, said during the call. The company did not specify the locations for these upcoming projects.
- “[We are] building the largest data centers in the world that we know of. We’re building an AI data center in the United States where you could park eight Boeing 747s nose-to-tail in that one data center,” said Ellison. “We’re bringing on enormous amounts of capacity over the next 24 months.”
Dive Insight:
Catz shared ambitions during the call for Oracle to join other tech giants like Google and Amazon in data center construction activity. These hyperscalers, or tech companies that operate massive data centers, account for about 60% to 70% of new data center absorption, according to Databank, a Dallas-based provider of data center services.
Google has announced various data center construction projects across the U.S., such as in Oregon, Texas, Ohio, Missouri and Iowa. Meanwhile, Amazon announced last year a commitment of $7.8 billion into its data centers in Ohio.
However, supply chain issues continue to cause some headaches in the data center construction pipeline.
PSMJ, a Newton, Massachusetts-based architectural engineering and construction data provider, found in a recent survey of architecture and engineering firms that proposal activity for data center facilities had decelerated. Additionally, buildout timelines have lengthened over the past few years for these projects, lasting now anywhere from two to six years, largely due to constrained power availability, according to CBRE.
Nevertheless, Oracle maintains that demand for its data center projects is soaring. The tech company also said it has been improving the time it takes to deliver them.
“The data centers take longer to build than we would like. That said, we are getting very good at building them quickly,” said Ellison. “Getting the building and the power and the communication links in — we’re doing that faster than we have ever had in the past.”
