Tom's Hardware and Digitimes reported May 2 that OpenAI has in practice walked away from the original Stargate JV model (Jan 2025 announcement: $500B / 10 GW by 2029 with SoftBank + Oracle) and is now pursuing large bilateral compute-leasing deals — primarily with Oracle, plus the recently announced expansion sites. OpenAI itself reportedly described Stargate as 'an umbrella for our compute strategy' rather than a discrete construction program. Stargate Michigan campus (1.4 GW, $16B Saline Township site, financing closed Apr 25 anchored by PIMCO + Blackstone after US banks pulled back) is now structured as a Related Digital build with Oracle as anchor tenant.
Primary source · Tom's Hardware ↗
Why it matters
Direct input to hyperscaler-lease-vs-build.md and bound to BTM-product-surface.md. The structural lesson: even the most aggressive AI buildout in the world has retreated from owning data centers to leasing capacity from purpose-built operators (Oracle, Crusoe, Related Digital). That validates the 'site readiness platform serving the dev-and-lease ecosystem' positioning over an 'AI hyperscaler tools' positioning — Cliff's customers are increasingly the developers/operators, not the AI companies themselves. The Saline financing is also a useful data point on the capital-stack reality: PIMCO had to anchor $10B because US banks retreated on AI-data-center risk; that means the capital available to fund $5B+ site readiness risk is constrained, which sharpens the 'underwrite the site, not just finance it' wedge. Add the financing-anchor pattern (PIMCO/Blackstone equity + insurance-style fixed-rate debt) to the developer-financing layer of the wiki — Cliff's de-rate calculator output is feeding into capital-markets diligence, not just utility filings.
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