Three of the week's biggest stories turned on the same question: does contracted demand become powered, financed capacity on schedule? Oracle sent a force majeure notice on its flagship Stargate campus. Nscale's S-1 laid out how much of its growth sits with two customers. SB Energy slowed its IPO. Texas separately told state regulators to stop issuing data center permits, which reached a Chevron-Microsoft power project. Anthropic's confidential prospectus, reported by Reuters, supplied the demand side of the ledger.
Oracle sends a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter
Oracle sent a force majeure notice to Stack Infrastructure, the Blue Owl-owned developer of Project Jupiter, according to Bloomberg sources cited by TechCrunch and Business Insider. Jupiter is the roughly 2.45GW Stargate campus in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, targeted for 2028. The reporting says Oracle is not trying to exit as anchor tenant. It is preserving the right to delay payments if the campus is late. Oracle says the project "remains on our planned schedule", and a spokesperson called such notices "commonplace". Blue Owl says the notice does not change the financial commitments.
The energy side is where the setbacks sit. An Energy Transfer pipeline meant to feed the site's Bloom Energy fuel cells slipped nearly six months, to Feb. 1, 2027, after the New Mexico State Land Office repeatedly denied a route (Financial Post). A separate air-quality permit for the fuel cells faces a Nov. 23 decision deadline. The $18B construction loan from about 20 banks is reportedly trading below 90 cents on the dollar, per Insurance Journal. Oracle fell 4.4% that day (down 29% year to date), Blue Owl fell 3.7%, and Oracle's credit-risk gauge hit a record high.
Bloomberg's sources say that if both sides agree a force majeure event tied to power commitments occurred, Oracle could win a three-year deferral on rent. It would still owe the full lease term eventually, and the notice does not trigger a default on the financing. Crypto Briefing reads the structure as leaving Oracle on the hook for debt service regardless. The same outlet, without naming a source, puts the build at about 26% complete in early September and at least seven months behind (Crypto Briefing). That sits against Oracle's public position.
Analysts split. RBC's Rishi Jaluria wrote that the notice "signals the company's own risk assessment on execution has shifted enough to warrant legal cover." Evercore called it "a pretty sensible move", and William Blair said the near-term impact should be limited because Jupiter is not expected to contribute revenue this fiscal year. Oracle reported $28.5B of Q1 FY27 capex against $8.5B a year earlier and kept FY27 guidance at $90-95B.
On Sept. 30, Aterio, a data vendor, published an analysis (via Business Wire) of Oracle's other large campus, Project Lighthouse in Port Washington, Wisconsin. Vantage is building it. Aterio sees a material risk of missing Oracle's second-half 2027 delivery guidance, with meaningful load unlikely before mid-2028. The constraint is a new high-voltage interconnection from American Transmission Company. The Wisconsin PSC revoked its completeness finding on ATC's first application in August after ten months, and ATC refiled in September, resetting the statutory clock. Aterio's base case is partial power around December 2027 and full 1.3GW around October 2028. These are Aterio's estimates, not commitments by ATC, Vantage or Oracle.
Nscale's S-1: fast growth, two customers
Nscale filed its S-1 on Sept. 18 for an NYSE listing under "NSCL", with Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley as lead bookrunners. Digitimes reported a raise of up to $3B at a $30-35B valuation. Crypto Briefing notes that against a March Series C at $14.6B, that range is roughly 2x to 2.4x (Crypto Briefing).
The numbers, as summarised by Yahoo Finance: H1 2026 revenue of $140.6M against $10.4M a year earlier, and FY2025 revenue of $33.0M. Net loss was $1.02B in H1 2026 and $761.8M in FY2025, with non-cash fair-value adjustments on warrants and convertibles a large part of it. The filing also discloses material weaknesses in internal controls. Fortune reports management flagged "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue as a going concern, and that Nscale is pitching $103B in contracts, "much not yet firm".
Concentration is the main thread. A single customer was 73% of 2025 revenue. It appeared in the filing only as "Spring" and was later identified as ByteDance, and it was still 52% of H1 2026 (Crypto Briefing). Tom's Hardware's headline says ByteDance gained access to more than 2,000 Nvidia B200 chips through Nscale's Norway data center via a Singaporean subsidiary (Tom's Hardware). Its body text was not retrievable. Nscale says that customer's share will fall below 20% this year.
The other side of the book is Microsoft (reported at $44B) and Anthropic (about $45B over six years, roughly 460MW at the Monarch campus in West Virginia). Yahoo's reading of the filing is that the Anthropic agreements depend on financing Nscale has not yet lined up, carry stringent delivery and uptime milestones, and give Anthropic several termination rights, including for delayed tranches.
Nvidia sits in several seats. It is a chip supplier and an investor, and it is taking $1B of a convertible round: $3.36B led by Third Point, with $2.36B closed and Nvidia's $1B expected in mid-November. Fortune also reports that Nvidia guaranteed up to $860.3M of lease obligations at a Ward County, Texas facility. Nscale has agreed to buy Anyscale for about $1.65B in stock, per Yahoo. Fortune also lists the Loughton, Essex site slipping to 2027. A Semafor note relays a WSJ report that analysts expect Nscale to postpone its investor roadshow (The Next Web).
The IPO window: open for some
SB Energy slowed IPO preparations, per an FT report on Sept. 22 (Yahoo Finance). The FT put the discussed valuation near $50B, while a Reuters source put the target around $60B (Economic Times). A $4.9B debt package tied to the buildout drew weak demand at yields around 10%. Reuters says SB Energy postponed formal marketing after further SEC questions and that investors balked at its reliance on OpenAI. The anchor is the Ohio PORTS-Pike campus: Nvidia guarantees up to $105B tied to OpenAI's 20-year lease and is investing $1.5B in SB Energy.
Others moved. Accelevation, a data center products and services firm, priced 30M shares at $18, below the marketed $20-24 range, raising $540M including selling-shareholder shares. Reuters cited surging bond yields (Economic Times). DayOne plans a public filing in mid-October and a possible November listing, reportedly raising up to $5B at about $20B. It closed a $4.5B Series C in June and reports about 2.1GW of capacity bookings. Switch has filed confidentially, and Vantage and CyrusOne are reportedly exploring listings. Shenton Research's Ke Yan said investors are focused on contracted revenue and existing power availability, and CBRE's Neil Bear-Hetherington said contracted revenue from financially strong customers matters most for debt-reliant developers.
Firmus is pursuing an ASX IPO. Crypto Briefing reports an A$11 share price, a raise of up to A$7.1B (about US$5B) and a listing slated for around Oct. 22-23. It reports an equity valuation of about A$43.7B and roughly A$30B of debt in an enterprise value near A$60B. It flags customer concentration in Meta and OpenAI (Crypto Briefing). Firmus signed agreements with Meta for GPU capacity at its Southeast Asian sites, with contracted capacity plus expansion options. Terms and sites were not disclosed. Meta already uses GB300 NVL72 systems at Firmus's Melbourne site. OpenAI became an anchor customer at two Malaysian sites earlier in September, lifting contracted capacity above 900MW.
Who underwrites the chips
Reuters reports that Nvidia's $500B chip-backed financing plan, announced in August with Blackstone, Apollo and KKR among the partners, is meeting lender pushback. The disagreement is chip life. Jensen Huang has said GPUs can have a useful life of up to a decade. Impax's Tony Trzcinka said banks typically underwrite GPUs over three to four years. S&P's Andrew Chang said GPUs have worked well beyond five years but that S&P takes a conservative view of their value. Nvidia has said some deals could carry no more than a 25% residual value guarantee, and Reuters' sources say initial deals will be backed by customer contracts plus Nvidia's guarantee. Precedents it cites: CoreWeave's $8.5B facility, described as the first investment-grade GPU-backed loan and rated A3 largely because of Meta's contractual payments, and Broadcom's backstop of more than 80% of a $35B structure for Anthropic.
The FT reported, via The Next Web, that Nvidia is talking to insurers, including through reinsurance broker Howden Re, about cover for loans to neoclouds that pledge its GPUs as collateral. It has given at least one insurer data on how fast its chips lose value. The talks may not produce deals. A secondary summary of Nvidia's Q2 FY27 disclosures puts supply obligations at $279B and guarantee obligations tied to AI cloud and data center partners at $108.5B (Crypto Briefing).
Smaller borrowers show where terms land. Sharon AI, an Australian neocloud, closed a US$356M GPU-backed SPV facility at a fixed 9.95% excluding fees. It calls this the first of a series supporting a build-out of more than 68,000 Nvidia GPUs by mid-2027. GMI Cloud raised $668M, made up of $223M of Series B equity and a $445M credit facility, and says contracted ARR tops $600M.
Anthropic's $518B ledger
Anthropic's confidential IPO filing, as reported by Reuters via the Economic Times, discloses at least $518B of infrastructure spending over about a decade with six partners, roughly 80% non-cancelable or payable regardless of usage. The named pieces are at least $111.1B with Google, $110B with Amazon and $31.4B with Microsoft. There is also about $161.2B of largely non-cancelable Broadcom-related equipment leases. AMD has committed to buy up to $5B of Anthropic stock and to supply compute capacity expected to exceed $20B. The filing says Anthropic is shifting from a cloud-only model toward dedicated data centers and directly leased chips.
The softer end is xAI/SpaceX: up to $84.5B for Nvidia-based capacity through 2029, mostly cancelable on 90 days' notice. Wccftech notes SpaceX's own S-1 disclosed a $42.5B minimum, and the article does not reconcile the two figures.
Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42B, per the prospectus as reported by Reuters. The notes would be convertible and could cover about a third of the $125.2B Anthropic has committed to a five-year TPU lease. Anthropic does not expect notes to be sold before its IPO. Seaport's Jay Goldberg told Reuters, "Nvidia is putting in place a massive amount of its balance sheet, and Broadcom is having to follow suit."
The other new contract was Akamai's. It announced an $11.6B, seven-year deal with Anthropic on Sept. 24, expandable by up to $9B and aimed at CPU workloads at the edge. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant over about 7.7M shares (roughly 5%) at $111.33. About 2% vests on the initial commitment and the rest as spend grows. Akamai puts capex tied to the commitment at about $5.5B and is raising 2026 capex guidance by about $1.7B to lock in components including memory. Its 2026 revenue guidance of $4.445-4.530B is unchanged, and revenue from the work is expected to ramp toward $1.7B a year by 2028 (IBTimes). Shares rose as much as 21% intraday and were up about 15% in early trading on Sept. 25.
Behind-the-meter power meets the permit desk
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sequenced three steps. An Aug. 3 order told ERCOT to audit data center developers. A Sept. 14 directive pushed the Texas Water Development Board to penalise data centers that skipped its water survey. A Sept. 21 letter told TCEQ to issue no data center permits until the ERCOT and TWDB audits finish. The Texas Tribune reads the TCEQ letter as closing the loophole for developers who self-generate behind the meter (The Next Web).
That reaches Project Kilby, the Chevron/Joulent project near Pecos that will use about 2.67GW of on-site gas turbines to power a Microsoft data center under a 20-year deal signed in June. Semafor reported that the final investment decision could slip from the end of 2026 into 2027. Chevron's Daniel Droog attributes the possible slip to Texas permitting and the moratorium, and says first power is still on track for 2028. Joulent's CFO says he expects the permits. Semafor's Tim McDonnell calls the Microsoft offtake "about as bankable as a power project can get" and judges the Texas and New York moratoria likely temporary. That is his read, not a reported fact.
Others are building the same way. Related Companies and NextEra, with Lewis Energy Group, were selected by the Commerce Department and the Republic of Korea for Project Star, a $22.3B, 6.47GW gas campus in La Salle County. At full scale it would serve a privately funded 5GW Related Digital campus next door. First generation is targeted as early as 2029, subject to permits, and the release frames it as consistent with Abbott's bring-your-own-generation directive. Enerflex also announced about 450MW of behind-the-meter gas units for an unnamed North American developer, delivering 2027-2028. QTS, NextEra, Siemens Energy, Quanta, Lancium and the Nuclear Energy Institute have launched a Texas coalition to defend data center buildout (Crypto Briefing).
Bridge power has enforcement risk outside Texas too. New Jersey fined DataOne $1.07M for running 62 unpermitted gas generators at its Vineland campus. The campus is being built for Nebius under its Microsoft deal. The units were not present at a December 2025 inspection and were found on July 29. DEP gave DataOne 45 days to get permits or stop, and the units can keep running meanwhile (Natural News, relaying Floodlight). DataOne disputes the temporary-generator classification, says Bloom Energy fuel cells are the permanent solution, and will apply for permits. Environmental advocates told reporters the fine may be too small to deter. Virginia's DEQ separately settled with Microsoft over its Leesburg campus: a $2,499,000 civil charge, of which $99,000 is cash and $2.4M funds air monitoring (Legal Insurrection).
Washington stalls, counties act
The Senate failed 57-43 on Sept. 30 to advance the Ratepayer Protection Act, short of the 60 needed (Daily Caller). The House had passed it 417-3 on Sept. 16. The bill only requires state regulators and nonregulated utilities to consider a standard under which customers of 100MW or more pay the full incremental cost of upgrades (American Prospect). Democrats led by Schumer called it toothless. Four Democrats voted to advance it. Sen. Heinrich's alternative, the GRID Savings Act (S.5199), would give FERC jurisdiction over loads above 150MW and assign interconnection costs to them. Separately, the bipartisan permitting-reform talks did not close before the Senate's pre-midterm break, per Grist. PJM suspended its one-time backstop auction for a 6.8GW shortfall until at least Feb. 28 while FERC holds a paper hearing, though that is secondhand reporting (Crypto Briefing).
Local action in the same week:
- Palm Beach County, Florida: a one-year moratorium on applications of 50MW or more, passed 6-0 on Sept. 24. The county rejected a Project Tango expansion in July.
- Metro Denver: Commerce City passed a six-month moratorium 7-1, and Thornton a one-year moratorium 5-3 covering data centers above 50,000 sq ft (Denver Post).
- Maryland and Virginia: Maryland's governor ordered a state review for projects of 25MW or more, and Virginia's governor proposed ending by-right approval above 25MW (Commercial Observer). Loudoun County's supervisors voted 7-1 to pause new applications for a year from Sept. 15, per the Legal Insurrection summary above.
In Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, NorthPoint Development offered every household $10,000 if its campus is approved. That covers about 4,500 households ($45M), on top of a pledged $120M over 15 years. It would be the first of up to 15 buildings on 1,300 acres. Many residents call it a bribe. The township rejected the project on zoning grounds and NorthPoint is challenging that in court.
The industry is also paying for a response. OpenAI, Blackstone, QTS and SoftBank back the American Infrastructure Alliance with five building-trades unions (The Next Web). A spokesperson describes a "high eight-figure campaign". The alliance's own Ohio poll found 18% favourable and 67% unfavourable toward data centers, with support flipping to 60%-34% when companies pledge to cover costs.
On the numbers, Data Center Watch counted 45 US projects worth nearly $68B disrupted in April-June, with 843 opposition groups across 49 states (Natural News). Morgan Stanley says local opposition has delayed or cancelled $286B of US projects since 2025.
China: Alibaba builds abroad, Chinese buyers rent offshore
Alibaba said at its Apsara conference it will open first cloud regions in Turkey, Finland and the Netherlands within 12 months and expand in Malaysia, Germany, the UAE, France and Hong Kong. CEO Eddie Wu set a target of more than 20GW of data center capacity by 2032. Alibaba also unveiled the Zhenwu V900 accelerator, which it says triples its predecessor's performance and clusters up to 500,000 units. T-Head says it has shipped 560,000 Zhenwu-family chips to more than 400 external customers. Alibaba is committed to more than $53B of AI spending over three years.
On Nvidia's side, its guidance of $108B for the next quarter assumes zero China data center chip sales. China's share of data center revenue, once 13-20%, fell below 1%.
Two stories this week involved Chinese buyers using compute capacity outside China. The first is ByteDance at Nscale, above. The second is Tencent, reported by the FT to have signed a $7B lease of about 100,000 AI chips from Oracle, housed in Southeast Asia. Neither company has confirmed it, and the chip type and sites are not given (Crypto Briefing).
A separate enforcement case involves physical hardware rather than rented capacity. Earthmade Computers founder Greg Lui was arrested over alleged export of about $300M of Nvidia-based servers to China, shipped via Malaysia and Singapore and then re-exported. Court papers say Earthmade received more than $176M from two Malaysia-based shipping companies in 2024. These are allegations only.
Schumer used a Sept. 17 floor speech to warn against loosening chip export controls ahead of Xi Jinping's visit. Bipartisan provisions are reportedly being added to the NDAA (Crypto Briefing).
The spending curve
CoreWeave reported $5.13B of 2025 revenue and Q2 2026 revenue of $2.58B (up 112%). It raised 2026 guidance to $12.4-13.2B from $12-13B. Backlog grew from $66.8B at the end of 2025 to $104.2B at June 30, and 2026 capex is planned at $30-39B.
Nebius reported Q2 revenue of $582M (up 454%) and a $37.5B RPO. Its Q2 capex was $5.7B against $2.3B of operating cash flow, and FY2026 capex guidance is $20-25B. Three customers made up 24%, 21% and 14% of Q2 revenue. 24/7 Wall St.'s bear case points at that capex gap, $12.1B of uncommenced lease obligations and a convertible carried at $20.8B fair value against $8.5B face (24/7 Wall St.). Nebius targets $7-9B of year-end run-rate revenue and 800MW-1GW of connected power.
Two bank notes frame the curve. Goldman strategists project the five largest US hyperscalers will spend about $1.2T on AI infrastructure capex in 2027, against about $800B in 2026 and a roughly $1.1T consensus (Crypto Briefing). Morgan Stanley forecasts hyperscaler and neocloud capex growth falling from 93% in 2026 to 61% in 2027 and 14% in 2028. It also estimates a 57GW power shortfall for 2026-2028 and says compute demand is likely to exceed supply for years (BusinessLine).
On the European side, Helsinki's Verda raised $189M and is now valued at $1B or more, though the exact figure is undisclosed. Verda reports a $165M annualized run rate in July 2026. Its live capacity is in Finland, and it targets more than 250MW of operations in 2027 (The Next Web).