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Larry Ellison stands on stage to give a keynote during the company's 2025 conference.Robert Galbraith/ReutersOracle and OpenAI's have plans to build $500 billion of data centers in a venture called Stargate.JPMorgan Chase has seen slower investor interest for $38 billion of debt tied to two Stargate sites.The pullback comes amid growing concerns about Oracle's credit rating and risk.Oracle and OpenAI have aimed to build $500 billion of data centers by the end of the decade to power their artificial intelligence ambitions.But the massive initiative, called Stargate, may be exhausting the supply of available capital.JPMorgan Chase, the bank that recently led a pack of lenders to extend roughly $38 billion of debt for the construction of two planned Stargate data center campuses in Texas and Wisconsin, has encountered diminished interest as it has sold off pieces of the loan to other financial players, a person familiar with the situation said.The person said that the two projects are fully financed, the syndication effort by JPMorgan had been successful overall, and that the slowdown in new participants hadn't alarmed bankers given that it was at the tail end of such a large debt offering.But the person acknowledged that banks and institutional investors had also grown wary in recent months of taking on too much exposure to Oracle, a tech giant whose credit rating sits below some of its peers in the AI race, including Microsoft and Google.The reticence among lenders and investors to continue bankrolling Stargate raises questions about whether the mega-project will meet its lofty objectives."We are hearing from market participants that in some cases, there may be banks that could be approaching the exposure levels they're comfortable with when it comes to certain data center projects," said Dhaval Shah, a director at S&P Global Infrastructure Ratings.The current unprecedented data center development cycle has been dominated by just a handful of leading players, testing whether lenders and investors will remain willing to continue to accrue heavy exposure to borrowers like Oracle. Oracle declined to comment.In November, credit default swaps that insure against losses on Oracle's corporate debt rose in cost, a reflection of the concerns around the company's enormous spending on AI.OpenAI, the AI chatbot maker that will anchor the Stargate facilities, meanwhile, produces revenue that is just a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars annually that would be necessary to justify the cost of its infrastructure."Oracle has become a proxy for OpenAI's ability to raise significant amounts of capital," said Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson. "It's a very precarious position."How the $500 billion Stargate project is being fundedOpenAI announced Stargate a year ago, stating that it would partner with Oracle and others, to build a total of 10 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2029 — roughly the equivalent power footprint of New York City on a day of peak electrical consumption.In October, OpenAI announced that it had arranged for the construction of six Stargate sites with a total planned capacity of roughly 7 gigawatts, stating that the pipeline "puts us on a clear path to securing the full $500 billion,10-gigawatt commitment" it had announced at the beginning of 2025.Much of the financing for the project, so far, has been provided by major financial institutions that have banded together to share its immense costs — as well as its risks — in what are known as syndication deals. JPMorgan Chase and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group led the syndication effort for the two Stargate projects in Shackelford, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin. Both banks declined to comment.Bank of America is leading a syndication to finance another Stargate data center campus in Michigan. A person familiar with that effort said that it has attracted interest from…

Mike and Darlene Person.Courtesy of JDM WhipzSiblings Michael Rumph and Darlene Person built JDM Whipz, a profitable Turo car rental fleet.JDM Whipz grew to 13 vehicles in Atlanta by reinvesting profits and focusing on customer service.Their experience highlights Turo business strategies, challenges, and the importance of planning.This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Michael Rumph, 60, and Darlene Person, 61, siblings in metro Atlanta who run JDM Whipz, a 13-car Turo fleet. It has been edited for length and clarity.Darlene: For several years, my brother, Mike, and I talked about wanting to go into business together. We considered a few ideas but hadn't settled on one.In February 2022, we rented an Escalade from Turo for a family trip. Almost exactly a year later, we launched our own Turo business, JDM Whipz.By 2024, JDM Whipz was making six figures in profit.We were fascinated by how quickly and easily we'd rented a car from TuroDarlene: Mike dove into research, sending me videos and websites every week. We began meeting on Sundays to discuss launching a Turo business.By January 2023, we had registered the company, and in late February, we went live on Turo, securing our first booking on the same day.I'm a federal government employee, and I still work full-time. Most of my Turo work takes place in the evenings, when I prep cars after my day job. When we started, both of us were balancing full-time jobs.Mike: I'm an IT nerd with 37 years of experience in desktop support, server support, and project management. Now, I'm a full-time Turo project manager.Our first car was a 2016 Toyota CorollaMike: The Corolla belonged to our mom, who died in June 2022. It's still on the platform; I just had the front end repainted and protective film added.From there, we purchased a 2017 Mazda, a 2017 Chevy Malibu, a 2017 Equinox, and a 2018 Equinox. By the end of our first year, we had 10 cars. We purchased eight with cash and used "creative financing" for the other two, purchasing them with 0% credit cardsToday, we have 13 vehicles — we own 12 outright and have one payment on a 2019 Chrysler Pacifica. We've had five cars totaled in the past year, but because I hold a dealer's license and buy vehicles wholesale at auctions, we've been able to replace them and even come out ahead on insurance payouts.The price difference compared to traditional rental companies is hugeMike: Enterprise once quoted me $805 for an SUV from Friday to Sunday. Turo cost us $360 for four days and 600 miles when we rented that Escalade.Darlene: We listed mom's Corolla as a trial, but the first renter kept extending her trip week after week, and it ended up being 2.5 months total. The car was gone, and we had nothing to do, so we said, "Let's add another."From the start, we reinvested every dollar back into the business. That's how we grew to 10 cars in a year.We choose Turo's 60% protection plan: we keep 60%, Turo takes 40%, but our deductible is lower. Hosts can take up to 90% but risk a much higher deductible. Understanding that trade-off is important.Mike: Day-to-day, I'm checking cars in and out, cleaning, handling inspections, and keeping up with competition in the Atlanta market.I left my IT job last April after paying off all my debts. I was breathing and dreaming of Turo at work. Now it's my focus.Darlene: Atlanta is huge, so Mike covers the north side, and I handle the south. We've never had all 13 cars sitting at our homes at once, where we store them.Usually they're rented out, coming back for a day or two before heading out again. I've learned more about cars in these two and a half years than I ever imagined.Turo does national advertising, but we're also exploring our own marketing effortsDarlene: We're obsessed with customer service. Over the years, we've both complained about poor service elsewhere. When we started JDM Whipz, I told…

Carolina Cloud cofounders Derek Fulton and Alice Pearson Fulton.Charlotte PearsonFormer Nvidia engineer Derek Fulton quit his job to launch the family cloud startup Carolina Cloud.Fulton said learning plateaued at the chip giant, and the money wasn't life-changing.He said the decision has improved his mental health and rekindled his love of technology.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Derek Fulton, 31, a former Nvidia software engineer who quit to found the North Carolina-based cloud startup Carolina Cloud with his wife. Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment about its work culture. The following has been edited for length and clarity.I've been messing around with computers since I got my first MacBook in 2006 at age 11. From building potato cannons to flying drones, I always wanted to solve problems and build things.After college, I worked in data science at a European bank and as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund specializing in mortgage investments.When a friend from college who worked at Nvidia posted on LinkedIn about a software engineering opportunity, I knew I had to apply. I've always been a technologist at heart, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see what all the fuss was about.When I first joined, I felt like I was learning a good bit. It was the first time I was on a team where software was the final product and not just an internal tool — where getting the last mile right really mattered.But after a few months, I felt like I wasn't learning anymore. There was a top-down management style and a nitpicky, boxed-in way of working. I worked on a lot of bugs and features, and when I asked to work on different projects that I wasn't familiar with, I was told no.People assume that if you work at Nvidia, you make a lot of money. My package was in the low six figures, and the wide disparities in pay between older and newer employees impacted the culture because we were all playing different games.The way I view a job is I want to either be learning or earning. I joined late enough that the money wasn't life-changing, and I felt I could get another job that paid roughly the same amount if it ever came to that. Also, our cost of living is reasonable in the Raleigh-Durham area, and my wife and I are both pretty fiscally shrewd.Reconnecting with my love for technologyI always knew I would launch my own company one day. One of my ambitions was to command my own time by the age of 30 and to have kids who could grow up seeing me do that every day.My wife and I invested about $20,000 to found our family-owned cloud provider, Carolina Cloud. We're bootstrapping for now, but aren't opposed to raising a small round down the line if we fill our current server fleet.Carolina Cloud does offer GPUs, but we're focused on CPUs because we believe they absolutely aren't going anywhere: they're less finicky, use less power, are cheaper, and last for years.At previous jobs where we'd rented cloud, the prices were so high compared to what I knew it would cost to actually build one of the computers, so I saw an opportunity to create a provider that delivered value while still making money.Carolina Cloud is focused on on-demand, high-performance compute. Some of our early customers are hedge funds and genomics companies, particularly in the Research Triangle. We differentiate from hyperscalers with lower pricing, no egress fees, and high-touch support.Quitting my job at Nvidia has turned out to be a boon for my mental health. After a couple of weeks, I started sleeping better, chatting with strangers in public, spontaneously running errands I'd forgotten about, and calling people I hadn't thought about in years.I've also been working really hard, but on my own terms, which has allowed me to reconnect with my love for technology.While it takes time to get a business off the ground, I told myself that if we didn't turn a profit in 18…