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Oracle to investors: Don’t worry about data center spending, company is ‘very, very good’ at cost-cutting

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Oracle has two magic words for investors concerned with the company’s aggressive data center spending: fast and cheap.

Shares of the cloud giant rose as much as 10% on Tuesday after it surpassed investor expectations for the third quarter and raised revenue guidance to $67 billion for fiscal 2026.

Still, Oracle faced some questions about its AI data center buildout and how it plans to justify the billions of dollars it burns along the way. In February, Oracle announced a $50 billion debt raise to help fund its AI ambitions. In the last year, the company has announced major data center projects in Texas, New Mexico, and Michigan.

On Oracle’s third-quarter earnings call Tuesday, Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler asked, “How comfortable are you with the values you’re creating from the AI data center business itself?”

Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk reassured Moerdler that the company is focused on minimizing the cost of its data center buildout to maximize future profitability.

“We continue to get better and better at running these data centers, delivering them more cheaply, optimizing the amount of cost for networking and hardware spend, as well as power,” said Magouyrk.

He added that Oracle is focused on accelerating the time its buildings spend under construction.

“We’re very good at it,” he said.

“We’re very, very good at reducing those costs during that time period.”

He did not give any other details on how exactly Oracle manages its data center budget.

In 2022, Oracle undertook significant cost-cutting measures, laying off thousands of people in the wake of its $28 billion acquisition of medical records giant Cerner.

In January, Business Insider reported that Oracle was struggling to find financing for Stargate, its $500 billion data center initiative with OpenAI.

Lenders and investors told Business Insider they were growing weary of the project’s lofty ambitions as it races to keep up with the rest of Big Tech amid the AI race.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are on track to spend $600 billion on data centers and AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.




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Big Tech’s new reality: Data centers are a war target

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As Anthropic and the Pentagon clashed over how the military should use AI, another new reality of warfare emerged several thousand miles away: data centers are now targets.

This week, Amazon said that three of its data centers in the Middle East — two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain — had been damaged by drone strikes during the US-Iran war.

Amazon Web Services, its cloud division, evacuated staff and closed access to at least one data center due to “structural damage” and flooding caused by the Sunday attacks, according to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider.

The two UAE data centers were “directly struck,” while the Bahrain site was damaged by a drone strike “in close proximity,” Amazon said Monday.

On Wednesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took responsibility for strategically targeting one of the Amazon sites due to the company’s support for the US military activities, Iran’s state media said. Business Insider could not independently verify this information.

It is the first time that Big Tech data centers have been directly targeted by military strikes, and it brings a new threat to the doorstep of companies that have invested heavily in the region to keep pace with the AI boom.

The Middle East has around 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, with an additional 1.7 GW in the pipeline, DC Byte, a data center intelligence company, told Business Insider. Most of the planned capacity right now is for Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the firm added. 1 GW is roughly equivalent to the power needed to run the homes of a midsize city like San Francisco.

The IRGC also claimed responsibility for targeting a Microsoft site in the Middle East.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no indication of any attack and that its data centers in the region were operating as normal.

Neither Google nor Microsoft’s data centers have shown any outages in the region this week, according to their service pages.

As of Friday, service at the damaged Amazon data centers remains offline or heavily disrupted. The company has recommended that customers “enact their disaster recovery plans.”

The outages underscored how dependent much of the world’s technology is on data centers. Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of the Dubai-based ride-hailing and food delivery app Careem, said earlier this week that some of its services were “impacted by an external AWS UAE outage” and had since been restored. Various banking apps also saw disruptions throughout the week.

An Amazon spokesperson pointed to the AWS Service Health Dashboard for the latest updates. A Google spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Defending data centers

Data centers are typically designed to be resilient, with workloads often distributed across different regions to limit the impact of a single location being knocked offline.

However, as the AI boom clashes against turmoil in the Middle East, the billions of dollars being poured into data centers come with more risk as a new warfare strategy emerges.

“Data centers have become the new infrastructure for economies,” said James Lewis, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you think about how people are going to build infrastructure, before it was railroads and steam engines. Now it’s data centers and fiber optics.”

The outages experienced by some services this week further highlighted how data centers could be considered a key infrastructure target in warfare.

Lewis cited the Russia-Ukraine war as another recent example in which data became central to the conflict, as Ukraine took steps to prevent Russia from accessing data stored on the country’s servers.

“The thing that has changed now in the Gulf is that people need to think about ‘how do we defend them?'” said Lewis.

Data centers emit a big heat signature that makes them difficult to hide, Lewis said.

“You’re not going to be able to hide them. The question is, can you harden them? Can you defend them? That’s what people haven’t thought about because we didn’t have to before,” he added.

Saudi Arabia is moving quickly to expand its data center capacity and position itself as a major global player in AI. The country last year launched Humain, a new company designed to build a full-stack AI ecosystem from data centers up to the models. Humain has also struck partnerships with Nvidia and AMD to build out data centers with their chips.

Meanwhile, tech giants are pledging to invest more in the region. In November, Microsoft said it plans to have invested $7.9 billion in the UAE by 2029, while Amazon pledged more than $5 billion as part of a strategic partnership with Humain last year.




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Amazon says 3 data centers damaged by drone strikes in Middle East

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Amazon said three of its data centers in the Middle East were damaged by drone strikes due to the US-Iran conflict in the region.

Two facilities in the United Arab Emirates sustained direct hits, while a third facility in Bahrain was damaged by a drone strike “in close proximity,” the company said in an update on its AWS cloud service dashboard on Monday afternoon.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” the company added in the update.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at ekim@businessinsider.com or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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One of Amazon’s data centers in the UAE caught fire after being hit by ‘objects’ amid the Middle East conflict

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  • Amazon Web Services had a power outage at one of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday.
  • The fire was caused by “objects” that impacted the facility at around 7:30 a.m. ET.
  • The impact sparked a fire. Firefighters cut power to the facility while they extinguished it.

Amazon Web Services said on Sunday that connectivity from one of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates was down after a fire at the facility.

AWS, Amazon’s cloud service, said that one of its “Availability Zones” had been “impacted by objects” at around 7:30 a.m. ET. The impact created “sparks and fire,” per AWS.

“The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire,” the company said.

The company did not say in its statement what the objects were.

According to Amazon’s website, an availability zone can comprise one or more data centers. The company has three availability zones in the UAE, per its coverage map.

The Sunday fire at the AWS facility happened amid US and Israeli military strikes on Iran and retaliatory attacks from the Iranian military on at least half a dozen Gulf states.

Read more about the US-Iran conflict

Photos and videos showed missiles streaking across the sky in Dubai on Saturday and Sunday. Fallout from intercepted missiles caused fires and other problems across the region. The Fairmont’s famed luxury property on the Palm saw damage, as did Dubai’s main airport and the Burj Al-Arab hotel.

Just before 7:30 p.m. ET, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some systems, but power was still down at the center.

“We do not have an ETA for power restoration at this time. For customers that can, we recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where applicable,” the company said in its Sunday evening statement.




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

I’m a data analyst who survived 3 rounds of layoffs at Block. I saw how AI was automating my work — it cost me my job.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ivan Ureña-Valdes, who has worked at Block for nearly four years as a data analyst. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When I got an email from Jack Dorsey, I was in the middle of interviewing someone for a role at Block.

It was pretty strange because, in the past, with layoffs, I knew people had their access cut almost immediately.

A coworker messaged me: “Hey, are you okay?” My heart started racing. I knew from that message it meant that I was probably getting laid off.

I felt really bad because I was in the middle of interviewing someone. I had to tell them, “I was actually just let go from the company. I probably won’t be able to submit your feedback in time. Please reach out to your recruiter.”

I’m the sole provider for my family. It was tough.

I had a hunch that AI would lead to cuts at some point

We knew there were many performance cuts happening around right now, and those have largely finished. I had no idea this cut was coming.

For 4,000-plus people to be cut without anybody knowing, that tells me decisions were made very high up.

I’ve survived three rounds of layoffs, some companywide, some engineering organization-wide. I knew I wasn’t being let go for performance-related reasons. I was in the middle of working on two large projects, probably the largest projects I’d worked on since joining the company.

I had a hunch that, at some point, the company would cut people because of AI. I just didn’t think it would be right now.

Working at Block, I saw how AI was automating tasks away

I appreciate Jack for his honesty. It’s much fairer of him to come straight out and say why it happened — that it’s because of AI and the vision he sees.

I’m honestly grateful for the generous severance and benefits. It definitely helps make the rough situation a bit easier.

I’ve felt the rumblings of AI disruption for a while now, especially since Anthropic launched Opus 4.5 late last year.

Jack loves AI and was constantly pushing us to use it. I got to use these tools as much as possible every single day.

I could see in my own work very quickly how much of it was already being automated. So much of the data analyst world is finding the right dataset, writing something that will allow you to pull the data set that you want, and then generating output. Every single one of those steps is significantly faster and easier because of AI.

It was definitely a “whoa” moment when I realized just how powerful things had gotten.

AI will continue to replace jobs

I 100% think that more disruption and more of these types of cuts will probably come at other companies, which is unfortunate.

I’m much more pessimistic about all of it than many other people probably are.

Given that we live in the US, where growth is everything, it’s inevitable that AI will continue to replace people wherever it’s financially beneficial to do so.

I’m optimistic that I can find a job in the general data field, whether it’s something I’m extremely passionate about or pays as much as I did before. It will be difficult to find something that matches the environment I was working in because I had developed really strong ties with my coworkers. The pay was fair within the data analytics or business intelligence world, and the role was remote.

There are incredible companies out there doing great work, though I am nervous about the industry as a whole and the competitiveness as I search for that perfect next role. Some people are getting really, really high salaries at AI companies, while tons of people at Block are getting laid off.

Do you have a story to share about tech layoffs? Contact this reporter at cmlee@businessinsider.com or on Signal at cmlee.81.




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Money managers are hungrier than ever for obscure data to give them an edge

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Sophisticated money managers have long turned to intel from credit-card receipts or satellite images of retailers’ parking lots into an investing edge, but this data is increasingly becoming table stakes.

Hedge funds and other money managers spent $2.8 billion on alternative data in 2025, according to a new report from consultancy Neudata, a 17% jump from the year before. It’s more than double what asset managers spent on alternative data in 2021, which includes a wide range of non-traditional information sources.

The report projects that the total spend on alternative datasets could jump to more than $23 billion in the consultancy’s bull case in 2030 and just under $8 billion in the bear case. The driver for this growth — and how much will come over the rest of the decade — will be based on how many new entrants, both buyers and sellers, enter the market, Daryl Smith, head of research at Neudata, said.

“Plenty of funds have only stuck their toes in,” Smith said, and “several hundred” new datasets were launched last year alone.

AI is also changing how funds consume and ingest alternative data sources, the report notes.

Now that structuring and cleaning raw data has become a faster, cheaper task thanks to AI tools, asset managers are looking for direct hook-ups to alternative data vendors’ feeds. It’s also opened up alt data to a range of managers that were once unable to pull meaningful insights from the data because of technical challenges.

These new funds could be a big driver of the industry’s growth in the coming years, from the demand side, Smith said.

More companies could be selling data

Some new data vendors might not be start-ups that stumbled onto something intriguing, but instead familiar brand names. Established corporations that have seen web-scraping bots take their data to sell are now getting into the game, Smith said.

He said Neudata’s consulting team, which helps new buyers and sellers navigate the market, has gotten outreach from big-name companies recently, though he said he couldn’t reveal the names of the potential sellers. Trustpilot, the consumer review website, is one example of a firm that has begun selling its data and has presented at Neudata conferences in the past, Smith said.

Unsurprisingly, data sources tracking the growth of artificial intelligence were in high demand last year. The report points out vendors such as Aterio, which track data center construction and power usage, for example.

Still, the most popular type of dataset, of which there are thousands, is web-scraping offerings, which accounted for 15% of the total spend in 2025, roughly in line with 2024.




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Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s idea of putting data centers in space is ‘ridiculous’

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman famously don’t agree on much.

The latest point of contention: data centers in space. Musk has made it a priority. Altman thinks it’s a fantasy, at least for now.

“I honestly think the idea with the current landscape of putting data centers in space is ridiculous,” Altman said during a live interview with local media in New Delhi on Friday, causing audience members to laugh.

Altman said that orbital data centers could “make sense someday,” but factors like launch costs and the difficulty of repairing a computer chip in space remain overwhelming obstacles.

“We are not there yet,” Altman added. “There will come a time. Space is great for a lot of things. Orbital data centers are not something that’s going to matter at scale this decade.”

Musk would almost certainly disagree.

While many Big Tech and AI companies are spending billions on data center construction on Earth, Musk’s eyes are on the stars, per usual. Orbital data centers are his latest ambition, as he mentioned in an all-hands xAI meeting in December.

In February, SpaceX said its goal is to launch a “constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers.” The company has already begun hiring engineers to make that happen.

During an all-hands meeting with xAI employees this month, Musk said SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI will allow them to deploy the orbital data centers faster.

Despite Altman’s skepticism, other tech leaders are also racing to place data centers in space. Google’s Project Suncatcher, unveiled in November 2025, aims to do just that. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Fox News Sunday the company could start placing data centers — powered by the sun — in space as early as 2027.

Tech and AI companies rely on data centers to power their products, like large language models and chatbots. Those data centers, however, can deplete water resources, strain power grids, increase pollution, and decrease the overall quality of life.

An investigation by Business Insider published last year found that over 1,200 data centers had been approved for construction across the US by the end of 2024, nearly four times the number from 2010.

Now, proposed data center campuses in Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere are increasingly facing stiff resistance from local communities.




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Big Tech wants more data centers. Residents in this New Jersey city said not here.

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Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Ben Dziobek’s voice rang across the night as he ran toward a crowd waiting outside New Brunswick City Hall on Wednesday.

The news? Members of the city council struck down potential plans to build a data center.

“They canceled it! They canceled it!” Dziobek shouts in footage shared by New Jersey’s Climate Revolution Action Network. Loud cheers followed, and then a chant: “The people, united, will never be defeated!”

The New Brunswick City Council had just decided to remove data centers from the list of permitted uses in a plan to redevelop several parcels of land. While no data center had yet been proposed, even the possibility that a data center could someday end up there raised alarm among city residents.

“The city administration is asking the council to amend the redevelopment plan to remove data centers as a permitted use, and to reinsert the requirement for inclusion of a park on the site that’s provided in the prior redevelopment,” New Brunswick’s city planner Daniel Dominguez said at the meeting.

Large, warehouse-style data centers have become a flash point for many communities across America as Big Tech and other AI companies look to power the large language models and chatbots they say are going to change the world. Those data centers, however, can be a drain on water resources and power grids, increase pollution, and decrease the quality of life.

An investigation by Business Insider published last year found that over 1,200 data centers had been approved for construction across the US by the end of 2024. These data centers, the report found, could consume as much power as entire US states and guzzle enormous amounts of water daily in drought-stricken regions.

In New Brunswick, those environmental concerns were top of mind.

“Community members cited concerns over environmental impact, energy consumption, water usage, noise pollution, and the broader implications of allowing large‐scale artificial intelligence and data infrastructure to expand into residential and public community spaces,” the Climate Revolution Action Network, a local environmental activist group that helped organize opposition to the redevelopment plan, said in a press release.

On Wednesday, residents and environmental advocates attended a New Brunswick City Council meeting to discuss the proposal.

During the meeting, Dominguez said the inclusion of a potential data center in the redevelopment plan was intended to “diversify the commercial development site,” but that it was “not critical to the project.”

Attendees cheered after the city council ultimately voted to nix the data center.

“I’d like to thank the council for deciding to scrap what many people did not want in their neighborhoods,” one attendee said. “We don’t want these kinds of centers in here that are going to take resources from the community.”

New Brunswick is one among many communities across the country fighting potential data center developments.

A large group of residents opposing a proposed data center in Clarmore, Oklahoma, turned out for a council meeting to discuss the project last week. Police arrested one of them for speaking for 30 seconds over their allotted three minutes. In San Marcos, Texas, hundreds of residents showed up at City Hall on Tuesday to protest a data center. The city council eventually scrapped that plan after a nearly 9-hour debate, according to local reports.




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Police arrested a man at a meeting to discuss a proposed Oklahoma data center after exceeding his time limit by 30 seconds

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Applause broke out during an Oklahoma man’s speech at a city council meeting on Tuesday to discuss a proposed data center. A minute later, shouts of disbelief rang out across the room.

“Disgusting!” one woman shouted as Claremore Police Department officers handcuffed and escorted Daniel Blanchard out of the room.

Authorities said they arrested Blanchard, whose speech exceeded the three-minute time limit, for trespassing.

Over 100 people, including Blanchard, had gathered in a ballroom at Rogers State University in Claremore to voice their opinions about the large data center project. The developer, Beale Infrastructure, is proposing a campus in the Claremore Industrial Park that includes data centers, supporting infrastructure, and office space.

Blanchard was among the residents who opted to speak during the public comment portion, which limits each person to three minutes. In his speech, Blanchard spoke about what he considered compliance issues related to the potential data centers.

“The Claremore Industrial Economic Development Authority has a fiduciary responsibility to the public, not to build infrastructure. And this act of overreach is putting the health and safety of members of this community at risk,” he said.

AI is driving a data center construction boom across the United States. While companies like OpenAI argue that building new data centers will reindustrialize the US economy and create jobs, residents of towns where developers are proposing new data centers worry about their impact on power grids, water resources, pollution, and overall quality of life.

In an investigation published in September, Business Insider reported that over 1,200 data centers had already been built or were approved for construction across the country.

The proposed data center in Claremore, a suburban hub of Tulsa home to about 20,000 people, has divided the town. During the three-hour meeting on Tuesday evening, dozens of residents spoke both in favor and against the project.

Blanchard exceeded his three minutes by about 30 seconds before police officers approached him. He gathered his notes and calmly followed the officers to the front of the hall, where town officials were sitting.

In a video of the meeting posted by the town on its YouTube channel, Blanchard appears to hand his notes to a council member. At that point, police arrested Blanchard, placing him in handcuffs. The crowd hollered in shock.

In a statement, the Claremore Police Department said officers aren’t responsible for enforcing city council rules and only become involved in city council meetings when an official orders them to remove an individual.

“The man’s position on the issues, what he said, or his unwillingness to follow rules of the meeting played no part in the officer’s decision to arrest him,” the statement said. “He was arrested for trespassing in compliance with the law and with the hope of restoring order to an important meeting.”

A local politician fighting the data center project posted to X on Wednesday that Blanchard has been released from jail. The next council meeting is scheduled for March 2.




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Snowflake’s CEO says software giants risk becoming a ‘dumb data pipe’ to AI models

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The biggest software companies might be reduced to mere data sources, says Snowflake’s CEO.

“The big model makers want to create a world in which all of the data for all of the enterprises is easily available to them,” Sridhar Ramaswamy said on an episode of Alex Kantrowitz’s “Big Technology Podcast” published last week. “Everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”

Prior to becoming Snowflake’s CEO in 2024, Ramaswamy was a partner at Greylock Ventures and cofounded AI search startup Neeva, which was acquired by Snowflake.

Ramaswamy added that Snowflake needs to operate with a “fear” that people would stop using AI agents developed by software companies and instead want an all-inclusive agent that has data from Snowflake, for example, and everywhere else

He said his solution was to let customers take the lead and decide how they want to access their data — directly through their own agents, or through a product like ChatGPT.

In the last few months, AI labs have evolved from being sources of AI infrastructure to becoming software providers themselves. OpenAI has entered the sales, support, and document analysis market, threatening incumbents such as Salesforce and Oracle.

On a podcast released last week, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anish Acharya said software firms were being unnecessarily punished by Wall Street over fears that AI could take over their industry. The VC said that legacy software could not be replaced so easily, because it would not be worth it to use AI for every business function.

He said that software accounts for 8% to 12% of a company’s expenses, so vibe coding to build the company’s resource planning or payroll tools would only save about 10%. Instead, companies should focus on big-ticket items, like developing their core businesses or optimizing other costs.

Ramaswamy and Acharya’s comments follow a brutal start of the month for software stocks, which dragged down tech and broader markets. The sell-off started when already-wary investors panicked about Anthropic’s new AI tool, which can perform a range of clerical tasks for people working in the legal industry.




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