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Dive Brief:
- Austin, Texas-based IT technology company Oracle plans to spend around $10 billion by 2025 in data center expansionits CEO Safra Catz said Monday during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
- Interest in the company’s cloud network is “extraordinarily high” and data center facilities are seeing strong demand, Larry Ellison, the company’s president and chief technology officer, said on the call . The company did not specify the locations for these upcoming projects.
- “[We are] build the largest data centers in the world that we know of. We’re building an AI data center in the U.S. where you could park eight Boeing 747s nose to tail in that data center,” Ellison said. “We’re bringing massive amounts of capacity over the next 24 months.”
Diving knowledge:
Catz shared ambitions during Oracle’s call to join other tech giants like Google and Amazon in building data centers. These hyperscalers, or technology companies that operate massive data centers, account for about 60 percent to 70 percent of new data center uptake, according to Databank, a Dallas-based data center services provider.
Google has announced several data center construction projects in the US, including Oregon, Texas, Ohio, Missouri and Iowa. Meanwhile, Amazon announced last year a commitment to $7.8 billion in its data centers in Ohio.
Despite this, supply chain issues they continue to cause some headaches in data center construction.
PSMJ, a Newton, Mass.-based engineering and construction data provider, found in a recent survey of architecture and engineering firms that propose activities for data center facilities had slowed down. Additionally, construction timelines have lengthened in recent years for these projects, lasting between two and six years, largely due to limited energy availabilityaccording to CBRE.
However, Oracle maintains that demand for its data center projects is increasing. The tech company also said it has improved the time it takes to deliver them.
“Data centers take longer to build than we’d like. That said, we’re getting really good at building them quickly,” Ellison said. “Getting the building, the power and the communication links, we’re doing it faster than we ever have in the past.”
