Larry Ellison
Co-founder and chief technology officer at Oracle
Oracle, the company that turned founder Larry Ellison into one of the world’s richest people, is setting itself up to power the future — or, in other words, the infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Commercial real estate will play a key role in this endeavor.
In June, the Austin-based company signed a $30 billion cloud-computing contract. The deal, worth more than the size of its entire cloud infrastructure business now, could triple its annual revenue starting in 2028. While Oracle won’t say who the client is, it’s widely believed to be OpenAI, the artificial intelligence juggernaut.
On the record, OpenAI has agreed to rent about 4.5 gigawatts of data center power in the U.S. as part of its Stargate initiative, Bloomberg reported. That amount of electricity is about the same as the total power production of the nation’s largest nuclear power plant.
And Stargate — a joint venture involving Softbank, Oracle and OpenAI announced at the White House earlier this year — plans to invest $500 billion in building new AI infrastructure over the next four years. Oracle is tasked with constructing those data centers.
“Oracle’s Gen 2 AI infrastructure business is booming,” Ellison said on an early 2024 earnings call. “That’s become pretty clear to everybody.”
On the personal front, Ellison is also quietly building a hospitality and residential empire.
The billionaire practically owns the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he bought for about $300 million in 2012. The sale included two Four Seasons resorts and two championship golf courses. He added a Nobu restaurant to one of the resorts.
Last year, he bought the Eau Oceanfront Resort near Palm Beach, Fla., for $277 million. The 310-room property sits near his 16-acre compound, for which he paid $173 million in 2022.
