AI infra: capex and unions

Artificial intelligence’s building boom is now a construction-and-financing story: Oracle is lining up as much as $50 billion for cloud capacity, while Microsoft has already posted a record $37.5 billion quarter of infrastructure spend. (oracle.com) (microsoft.com) Oracle said on February 1 that it expects to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in gross cash proceeds during calendar 2026 to expand Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for customers including OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, xAI and TikTok. The company said it plans to split that funding between debt and equity while keeping an investment-grade balance sheet. (oracle.com) Microsoft reported capital expenditures and finance leases of $37.5 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2025, up 66% from a year earlier. Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said on the January 28 earnings call that roughly two-thirds of that spending went to short-lived assets, primarily graphics processing units and central processing units. (microsoft.com) (cnbc.com) That spending is going into data centers, the warehouse-sized facilities that pack in chips, power gear and cooling systems so companies can run and train large artificial intelligence models. OpenAI said its Michigan Stargate campus alone is planned at more than one gigawatt, a scale more commonly associated with power plants than a single computing site. (openai.com) The labor model is changing with the buildout. OpenAI, Oracle and Related Digital signed a labor agreement with North America’s Building Trades Unions for the Stargate campus in Saline Township, Michigan, and the project is expected to employ more than 2,500 tradespeople and apprentices. (openai.com) (edtechinnovationhub.com) The Michigan deal was announced at the union group’s Legislative Conference in Washington on April 20, and the project will be covered by the National Maintenance Agreement used by 14 affiliated skilled-trade unions. OpenAI said construction was expected to begin in early 2026. (edtechinnovationhub.com) (openai.com) OpenAI said the Michigan campus is part of a 4.5-gigawatt partnership with Oracle and pushes Stargate past 8 gigawatts of planned capacity across announced U.S. sites. The company said the broader program represents more than $450 billion of investment over three years as it works toward a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt target first announced in January 2025. (openai.com) Wall Street is now debating what these projects do to cash flow before they produce revenue. Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci told Yahoo Finance, in remarks reported by Benzinga on April 21, that Oracle’s fiscal 2026 capital spending could reach $50 billion and argued the payoff may not show up in free cash flow until fiscal 2029 and 2030. (benzinga.com) Microsoft’s own numbers show the same tension between demand and build time. On its January earnings call, Hood said customer demand continued to exceed supply even after the company brought more capacity online, while Data Center Frontier reported Microsoft is building both “sovereign cloud” regions for local data-control rules and larger “AI factory” campuses for model training and inference. (microsoft.com) (datacenterfrontier.com) The new question is less whether companies want more artificial intelligence compute than who can finance it, power it and staff it fast enough. In 2026, the race is being measured in bond deals, gigawatts and union hiring halls as much as in chatbot launches. (oracle.com) (openai.com)