Oracle reportedly delays several new OpenAI data centers because of shortages — tight material and labor supply frustrate expansion plans, possibly by a year or more

Bloomberg's sources familiar with the projects reportedly blame shortages of skilled labor and 'materials' for the setback, though it is unclear whether by 'materials' they mean building materials, shortages of data center equipment, or shortages of materials for building out infrastructure surrounding AI data centers. Despite the delay from 2027 to 2028, the overall scope of the projects that Oracle will build for OpenAI remains unchanged, the report says.

The delayed facilities are part of a contract between Oracle and OpenAI inked in July, under which the two parties plan to increase Stargate AI data center capacity to two million AI accelerators and 5 GW of power. Despite the revised timelines, the U.S.-based AI campuses are still planned on an unusually aggressive scale, and some of them are designed to rank among the largest data centers globally once completed. In fact, given the scope of the projects, delays and slipups are inevitable.

The head of Oracle also stressed that the company continues to see strong demand for AI capacity, but emphasized that the company only accepts orders if it feels confident that it can fulfill them.

"Our pace of capacity delivery continues to accelerate," said Magouyurk. "We continue to see strong demand for AI infrastructure across training and inferencing. We follow a very rigorous process before accepting customer contracts. This process ensures that we have all the necessary ingredients to deliver to customer success at margins that make sense for our business."

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.