The models described elsewhere in these briefings are cheap to use because somebody is spending a fortune to build them, and the size of that fortune became the largest single question in the world economy in the autumn of 2025. This briefing sets out what was committed in the six weeks to the start of November, by whom and with whose money; what the sceptics and the builders actually said; and what it looks like from Ireland, where the constraint is the grid rather than the share price. It is written on 3 November with the sources available then.
Stargate, and then the October deals
Stargate was announced at the White House on 21 January 2025 as $100bn immediately and up to $500bn over four years, backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX, with a first campus in Abilene, Texas.[1] On 23 September OpenAI added five more American sites, bringing planned capacity to nearly seven gigawatts and committed investment over three years above $400bn.[2] Then the chips came in a rush, and the structure of those deals is more interesting than the headline numbers.
| Counterparty | Announced | Scale | Structure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | 22 Sep | 10 GW | Letter of intent for up to $100bn, released at roughly $10bn per gigawatt as each is deployed; non-binding until a definitive agreement |
| AMD | 6 Oct | 6 GW | Warrant over 160m AMD shares at $0.01, vesting on deployment milestones and on AMD's share price, the last tranche needing 6 GW and a $600 share price |
| Broadcom | 13 Oct | 10 GW | Co-design: OpenAI designs the accelerator, Broadcom builds it; deployment 2026 to 2029 |
| Oracle | Reported 10 Sep | 4.5 GW | About $300bn over five years; Oracle's disclosed backlog reached $455bn and it raised $18bn in bonds |
| CoreWeave | Through 2025 | Not stated | Contracts expanded three times to about $22.4bn |
For scale, Ireland's entire electricity system peaks at a little over six gigawatts. CNBC's tally of the fortnight put OpenAI's commitments at roughly 33 gigawatts, and the Financial Times put the cash value of the stack at about a trillion dollars.[8][9] Almost none of it exists. These are commitments to build, financed by the chipmakers' own investments in their customer, by debt, and by revenue not yet earned.
The financing engineering is worth one paragraph of its own. On 21 October Meta put its two-gigawatt Hyperion campus in Louisiana into a joint venture with Blue Owl: the vehicle raised $27bn of private debt and $2.5bn of equity, Blue Owl's funds hold 80% and Meta 20%, and Meta keeps operational control while the debt sits outside its own balance sheet. It was reported as the largest private-credit transaction ever done.[10] A week later Microsoft and OpenAI signed their restructuring, in which OpenAI committed to an incremental $250bn of Azure purchases and Microsoft took about 27% of the new public-benefit corporation.[11]
What the earnings calls said
- Amazon (2025)$125bn
- Alphabet (2025)$91 to 93bn
- Meta (2025)~$72bn
- Microsoft (Q1 FY26)$34.9bn
Microsoft reported $34.9bn of capital expenditure in a single quarter, about half of it in short-lived assets like GPUs, and said the growth rate would accelerate; the shares fell about 4%.[12] Alphabet raised its 2025 guidance to $91bn to $93bn, the second raise of the year, and flagged a significant increase for 2026.[13] Meta guided 2026 to $115bn to $135bn against about $72bn in 2025, and its shares fell more than 11%.[14] Amazon raised 2025 to $125bn and said it would likely rise again; its shares went up.[15] The market, in other words, has started to distinguish between companies it believes are buying revenue and companies it believes are buying a hole in the ground.
Can it pay for itself?
Bain & Company's annual technology report, published on 23 September, did the arithmetic everyone else now quotes. Meeting projected demand means about 200 gigawatts of new global compute by 2030; funding it needs about $2 trillion a year in AI revenue; and on current trends the industry will fall roughly $800bn short.[16] The people best placed to know have been candid. Sam Altman told reporters in August that investors as a whole were overexcited about a kernel of truth, and compared the moment to the dot-com bubble, in the month his company was raising at a $500bn valuation.[17] Jeff Bezos, at Italian Tech Week on 3 October, called it an industrial bubble rather than a financial one, meaning the capacity gets used even if the investors are not repaid, which is roughly what happened to the fibre-optic cable laid in 1999.[18] Jamie Dimon told the BBC on 9 October that a lot of the money would probably be lost and some of it would produce great returns.[19] The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee put it more flatly on 8 October: "The risk of a sharp market correction has increased."[20]
The sharper critique is about circularity. Nvidia invests in OpenAI, which buys Nvidia chips; AMD hands OpenAI warrants whose value depends on AMD's share price, which depends partly on the market believing OpenAI's orders are real; Oracle borrows to build capacity pre-sold to OpenAI and books the contract as backlog. None of this is improper, and vendor financing is old. The precedent people reach for is telecoms in 2000, when Lucent, Nortel and Cisco lent their own customers billions to buy their equipment and the loan books went bad when the customers did. What is new is the scale, and the fact that the eventual payers, the businesses that will buy inference, have not yet been asked whether they will pay enough. The analyst Gil Luria put the blunt version on the record: "OpenAI is in no position to make any of these commitments."[9]
The physical constraint
Money is not the binding constraint; electricity and turbines are. The International Energy Agency's April report put global data-centre consumption at about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, roughly 1.5% of world electricity, and projected about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, growing at around 15% a year, more than four times the growth of demand from everything else.[21] The equipment queue tells the same story: GE Vernova's gas-turbine backlog grew from 29 to 33 gigawatts in a single quarter, with slot reservations on top, which means the limit on new gas generation is now factory capacity rather than orders.[22] The buyers have turned to nuclear: Meta signed a twenty-year agreement for the entire 1.1 gigawatt output of Constellation's Clinton plant from 2027, Google contracted for up to 500 megawatts of small modular reactors from Kairos, and Amazon for up to 1,920 megawatts from Talen's Susquehanna plant.[23][24][25] And in the United States the median project now waits about 61 months in the interconnection queue, against 36 months a decade ago, with roughly 2,061 gigawatts of capacity waiting.[26]
Ireland
- 22%
- Share of Ireland's metered electricity consumed by data centres in 2024, at 6,969 GWh, up from 5% in 2015 [27]
- 4 years
- How long the industry says Dublin has effectively been closed to new grid connections [28]
- 61 months
- Median wait in the US interconnection queue for a project reaching operation in 2025, against 36 months in 2015 [26]
In Ireland the build-out is measured in megawatts and argued about in the Dáil. The Central Statistics Office reported in June that data centres consumed 6,969 gigawatt-hours in 2024, 22% of national metered electricity and up 10% on the year; the share was 5% in 2015, and no other country in Europe is close.[27] Since late 2021 the practical position around Dublin has been a moratorium: the chairman of Digital Infrastructure Ireland told RTÉ in October that "you cannot get a connection off the grid now" from any of the network operators, and that the country was "four years now in a defacto moratorium on any new investments", with capital going instead to the UK, the Nordics and central Europe.[28] The responsible minister's counter, given in September, was that data centres underpin hundreds of thousands of jobs and that this gets ignored in the political argument.[29]
The regulator spent 2025 consulting on the terms for reopening. Its February proposal would require a new data centre to bring its own generation or storage matching the demand it asks for, to trade that power into the wholesale market, and to disclose unused connection capacity, with the generation allowed to sit nearby rather than strictly on site.[30] The decision is expected before the end of the year. For a business renting a fraction of that capacity, the consequence is geography: EU-hosted increasingly means Paris, Frankfurt or the Nordics as well as Dublin.