On March 6, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had abandoned plans to expand their Stargate datacenter in Texas. The same day, Bloomberg reported that Oracle was cutting thousands of jobs to handle a "cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort." And Bloomberg reported that SoftBank was seeking a bridge loan of up to $40 billion — its largest ever — to fund AI investments. Three stories about three problems at the same project. Separately, each reads as a speed bump. Together, they are the balance sheet of the largest AI infrastructure promise ever made.

The Announcement

Stargate was born as a number: $500 billion. Announced by President Trump in January 2025 with SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI as partners, it was described as the most ambitious AI infrastructure project in history. Within days, sources told the Wall Street Journal that SoftBank hadn't secured funding. The Financial Times noted that Masayoshi Son's $100 billion AI investment pledge to Trump "would require a massive increase in borrowing."

That prediction turned out to be the most accurate forecast anyone made about Stargate.

The Borrowing

SoftBank's bridge loans tell the story as a time series.

The bridge loans alone escalated from $16 billion to $40 billion in twelve months. The investments they funded — $22.5 billion into OpenAI, with $30 billion more under discussion — required still more borrowing to cover. Each quarter, the gap between what SoftBank had committed and what it could fund widened. The bridge kept extending because the other side kept receding.

The Engineering

Oracle's side of the ledger is worse.

To build Stargate's datacenters, Oracle embarked on what may be the most aggressive financial engineering campaign in tech history. In the three months ending October 2025, Oracle signed roughly $150 billion in datacenter leases. To fund the construction, Oracle sought $15 billion in bonds in September. By October, banks were preparing a $38 billion debt sale. By Christmas, the Financial Times revealed that Oracle had moved $66 billion of AI datacenter debt off its balance sheet into special-purpose vehicles — financial instruments designed to keep obligations off the books. Tech companies weren't alone: Bloomberg reported that Meta and xAI were doing the same thing, starting "a trend for billions in off-balance-sheet debt." But Oracle's scale was in a different category.

in AI datacenter debt moved off Oracle's balance sheet into SPVs

In December 2025, Bloomberg described how the Stargate deal had "pushed Oracle to the brink." Oracle pushed back the completion dates for some datacenters. Blue Owl Capital refused to back Oracle's planned $10 billion, 1-gigawatt datacenter. Oracle's stock fell 30% in a single quarter — its steepest drop since 2002.

The response was to borrow more. In February 2026, Oracle said it planned to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in 2026 to build additional capacity. It began selling $25 billion in bonds — what Bloomberg described as "one of the biggest-ever corporate debt offerings."

One month later, the datacenter was abandoned.

The Retreat

By February 2026, The Information reported that OpenAI had "scrambled for compute as Stargate stalled amid clashes with SoftBank." Building its own datacenters was "not its near-term priority." The $500 billion project that was supposed to guarantee American AI supremacy was, internally, a source of friction rather than compute.

March 2026
Sources: Oracle and OpenAI abandoned plans to expand a Stargate Texas data center amid disputes over the project
Bloomberg

March 6 made it official. The Texas datacenter expansion was abandoned. Oracle was cutting thousands of workers because the datacenter spending that was supposed to justify the borrowing had instead created a cash crunch. And SoftBank needed another loan — $40 billion this time — because the previous loans hadn't been enough.

On the same day, OpenAI launched GPT-5.4, its "most capable and efficient frontier model." The model shipped. The infrastructure to run what comes after it did not.

The Ledger

Stargate was announced as a $500 billion infrastructure project. What the fourteen months since reveal is that it was always a financing operation — and the financing is now larger than the infrastructure it produced.

signed in three months
moved off-balance-sheet
planned bond sales and debt
escalating over 12 months

The Wall Street Journal observed in September 2025 that "debt is fueling the next wave of the AI infrastructure boom." The Financial Times calculated that OpenAI's datacenter partners were set to rack up nearly $100 billion in debt. Banks were marketing $56 billion in investment-grade datacenter construction bonds.

None of this was hidden. Every bond sale, every SPV, every bridge loan was reported individually. But assembled into a single ledger, the picture is different from what any single story conveyed. Oracle didn't just borrow to build — it borrowed at a pace that outran its ability to build, signed $150 billion in leases it couldn't service, moved $66 billion off the books, and watched an investor walk away. SoftBank didn't just invest in OpenAI — it borrowed to invest, then borrowed more to cover the borrowing. And the datacenter at the center of it all was abandoned the same month Oracle started cutting the workers who were supposed to build it.

The $500 billion was never a budget. It was a financing problem disguised as an infrastructure plan.

GPT-5.4 costs $2.50 per million input tokens. The intelligence keeps getting cheaper. The building to put it in keeps getting more expensive. That's the leverage.