Electricity is about 3% of their total operating cost, so, yes.

Most fuel cells can't be recharged. They take combustible gases, re-assemble the molecules in the gas into H2O or something chemically stable, and release the energy delta as voltage potentials. The cells work purely as catalysts. Only the fuels are expended.

It's just a type of battery, that takes fuel, as its refillable energy source. Weird but it works.

Fuel cells are an electricity generation method. They oxidize fuels (methane, hydrogen) at low temperature, electrochemically, without combustion—going directly from fuel to electrons.

This would have been simply a natural gas power plant, of a different type.

"either by upgrading the grid to handle it or building generators nearby" -- probably in the long run but in the short run impossible. Generators and utility interconnections are back ordered. I think gas turbines are back ordered like 3+ years.

Bloom is super expensive for what it is. It's only doing well right now because demand for power surged and they have a product that can fill the gap, hypothetically, quickly.

Yes, there is a completely different thing with the same name. Race cars can use fuel cells to prevent sloshing. Those are basically fuel tanks with foam in them.

That was not my understanding. Unless this installation was supposed to be producing fuel on site somehow, fuel cells are a mechanism for turning fuel into electricity.

https://www.bloomenergy.com/technology/

Failing to get a permit is not an act of god, having to pay even when the site does t have power is poor milestone / payment planning. Also it’s quite hard to request payment if the thing you are buying is not working (appreciate this quite complex here), but if the people who are delivering the data center are responsible for delivering the power, it feels like oracle would be within reason to not pay?

Its funny how before Oracle got in everybody was guessing who'd be swimming most naked when the tide goes out. CoreWeave obviously, but OpenAI likely as well depending on whom you'd ask.

With the contracts that "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" jumped on its without a doubt Oracle going down second if not first.

He's just gambling because he's old and feeling bold.

And there’s a good chance of inappropriate protective action from the US government.

Makes sense and it shows

We must have extremely different definitions of what constitutes "best" or even "good"

Uh, it's only the "best" in the same sense that Windows Server is the best server infra on the planet. And arguably Windows has some network bandwagon effect behind its momentum: when your workstation supplier supplies machines with Windows pre-installed and you have built an IT Support Team with the expertise for Windows technologies, it only makes sense to also use Windows in your server.

AFAICT the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS DBs is vendor support and the only thing Oracle has over established FOSS vendors like Percona is a ginormous marketing budget. I'm always grimused when I see Oracle product placement in the MCU.

OracleDB, MongoDB and PHP over IIS natively on a single Windows machine running on Azure. Delicious.

"The best", but you'll be sued if you publish benchmarks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause

Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.

Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!

This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.

The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.

In an actual Ponzi scheme yes. The AI bubble isn’t a Ponzi scheme. Infra investment ahead of revenue is fairly standard in tech and not inherently bad. However if the revenue to pay for all that infra doesn’t materialize then you have a bubble implosion. Right now while the revenue and growth numbers for AI revenue would be incredibly impressive by most standards, there’re still a drop in the bucket relative to what’s needed to stop this whole house of cards from crashing down.

Most developed countries are ponzi schemes, since they all have old age benefits where new people pay old people.

You're calling the stock market a Ponzi scheme?