Hyperscalers are hiding a massive secret about uninstalled GPUs | Ed Zitron

A 48-minute interview on The Tech Report, recorded just after news broke that Oracle had sent a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, its planned data-centre campus in New Mexico. Zitron reads it as the visible case of a general problem rather than a one-off. Oracle, he says, signed a “hell or high water” lease, meaning it pays whether or not the power arrives, so the notice tells you it doesn’t expect power by 2028. AI data centres are the hardest construction projects going, each pulling a city’s worth of power into a small space and needing scarce transformers, steel and specialists, and most of them, he says, are running late.

The middle of the episode revisits his estimate of GPUs bought and not switched on: $200 billion to $300 billion of Nvidia hardware sitting in warehouses or unpowered buildings. He builds it from the construction-in-progress lines that Google, Meta, Amazon and others report, about $374 billion by his count, of which he says 50 to 60% is chips, plus one source’s figure for Microsoft, which does not report the line. He says the true number is impossible to calculate. If chips take two years to install, Nvidia’s sales measure the appetite for speculation, not demand. He puts the buying down to fear of missing out and of “Jensen jail”, losing your allocation if you buy someone else’s chips, which he says should interest antitrust regulators. Depreciation that isn’t keeping pace with capital spending is, for him, the tell.

What ends the bubble, he argues, is not ethics but the cost of debt. Oracle sits one notch above junk, a downgrade would make it a “fallen angel”, and he thinks Oracle failing is likelier than OpenAI failing. Rising Treasury yields and data-centre debt at 9 to 13% will, in his words, “bury this”. He ends on agents such as Meta’s Muse: the assistant promised in 2022 has finally arrived, expensive and without a clear customer.

The Oracle story checks out. Bloomberg reported it first, on 24 September 2026. The notice went to Blue Owl’s Stack Infrastructure, developer of the 2.45 GW campus, and seeks to defer rent, by up to three years, if power delays stop it opening in 2028. The gas pipeline’s in-service date slipped six months to February 2027, and New Mexico’s State Land Office has twice refused rights of way. Oracle says the project remains on schedule. S&P did cut Oracle to BBB-, one notch above junk, on 9 July 2026, and 404 Media did report Muse’s phone calls being placed by people in a call centre during beta. Two of his citations are shakier. Bernstein’s figure is that 35 to 40% of announced capacity is at risk of delay or cancellation, not that only 35% ever gets built. And “Jensen jail” is a half-joking insiders’ name for a fear of losing allocation, reported via the Wall Street Journal, not a documented Nvidia policy. The claim about how Anthropic calculated its run rate, which he says he can’t confirm, traces to a single unsourced Substack post.