Subject: Re: AI data centers and your electric bill
Is he saying they’re building data centers, contracting for electric power without the power company building any accompanying infrastructure? No new power lines, trunk lines, transformer stations? No guarantees that the data centers will pay for it whether or not it is in use?

Apparently, yes. Crazy, right? But that's because this isn't merely a contract - it's a fancy way of letting Oracle issue debt without issuing debt.

There's a copy of the MPSC Order in the article linked above. While not a copy of the contract, the terms of the contract are summarized in the discussion. Essentially, the customer is on the hook for the entire cost of building all of the infrastructure, whether they use the electricity or not. They are required to pay every year for 80% of the capacity of the infrastructure (ie. they've got a minimum payment that uses up 80% of what the infrastructure could generate, whether they buy or use the electricity or not), which covers both operational costs and the amortization of the infrastructure investment. If they default, they have a termination fee of all of the infrastructure investment that has not yet been paid off - ballooning upfront. The termination fee is backstopped by both a guaranty by the parent company (ie. the limited liability SPE can't shield the parent company, which is Oracle) and a letter of credit that can be called if the customer and the parent both default.

It is indeed a very unusual contract - but that's what happens in bubbles. People race to build infrastructures (whether it's railroads or data centers) and agree to all kinds of unlikely terms so they can move fast. Terms which end up being really, really bad for them if the tide goes out.

This actually is just debt. It's just a different flavor of what the Big Tech Companies have been doing with their SPE's to issue not-debt debt to build data centers. Since Oracle (and Google and MSFT and all the others) wants to keep their balance sheet nice and pretty, they don't issue corporate debt to finance the building of data centers. They create a SPE and have it go out and borrow the money, secured by the Big Tech Company's lease agreement to pay rent for X years. I haven't seen any articles going into the weeds on those leases, but I imagine they have terms similar to this contract: guarantees by the parent company and security in case of default.

Again, if you're worried about this stuff blowing up, all of this very much rhymes with the subprime mortage crisis. Instead of homeowners getting mortgages from banks (that end up financing the construction of the homes) which then spread the risk around with credit default swaps, you have the Big Tech Companies creating these SPE's to borrow massive amounts of money (that end up financing the construction of the data centers), the risk of which is spread around with guarantees and other security (like the letter of credit given to MSPC).

So if the bubble blows up, the financial impact spreads throughout the entire financial system - just like with the subprime mortgage crisis. Because it's not just the damage when the rent/electric bill doesn't get paid (analogue to mortgage payments and the mortgages going bad), it's all the damage to the counterparties that have sliced and diced that risk and hold it on their balance sheets as well (analogue to all the credit default swaps that spread the counterparty risk throughout the financial system).