美国已故富豪、淫媒爱泼斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）在世时被控参与性贩卖未成年少女，其后在拘留期间突然离世，让整件事顿成谜团。多年来，有关爱泼斯坦如何发迹的传言一直甚嚣尘上。美国媒体近日一项调查揭示了这位大学辍学生，如何靠着人脉和假学历混入投资大行贝尔斯登（Bear Stearns），然后利用工作便利将自己包装成投资大师和避税顾问，在获取富豪客户信任后不断榨取他们的金钱，同时又利用这些人际关系去结识更多的权贵，逐步踏上美国上流社会的顶峰。
The issues surrounding Oracle's (ORCL) data center funding and potential build delays are widely considered by market analysts to be a high-to-severe concern for the stock's short-to-medium term performance. The severity is primarily rated by market reaction, credit risks, and potential impacts on major contracts like the one with OpenAI.
在今年9月10日以创纪录的涨幅刷新历史新高后，甲骨文股价便开始一路走低。本月以来，公司连遭利空突袭，进一步加剧了外界对于人工智能行业前景和估值泡沫的担忧。
A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Fernando de Leon, founder of Leon Capital Group, started a small lot development company in 2004 with $100,000 and turned it into a $10 billion business, focused mainly on commercial real estate. He did that, he says, by predicting distress, watching the source of capital and leaning on his Harvard degree in evolutionary biology.
While others lost their shirts in the great financial crisis, De Leon began to make his fortune. He left a job at Goldman Sachs to start his own business and was doing some deals in residential lot development. A year in, he said, he saw some of the early indications from subprime mortgages and overbuilding that this was going to be “a difficult cycle change.”
“We basically said, look, we see things here that are fundamentally unsound. We’re going to take these property positions and sell them, and then kind of wait and see what happens,” De Leon told Property Play.
“We divested, we brought back some liquidity, and then we sort of waited, and then in 2008 to 2012 we became fixers. We became people that were able to talk to banks, to life insurance companies, to businesses that had loan exposure, and we were able to solve problems for them,” he said.
De Leon said he turned around projects that had stalled and become problematic for lenders, experience he now says informed his thinking in the early years of the pandemic.
“In 2021, we sold a great deal, several billion dollars of real estate because prices were high, and that was a function of low interest rates and euphoria and bad incentives in the market,” he said. “Part of it is understanding where the capital is coming from. You begin to see participants in the market that shouldn’t be there ... and when they match up and that funnels through the supply chain, you begin to see distortion and pricing.”
Now, De Leon said, he’s seeing the same red flags flying over data centers.
While big players like Blackstone, KKR and Bain Capital are buying in, De Leon said he is sitting out.
“The thing that I can’t quite square is the data center play. I look at a data center that’s $10 billion, right? First of all, there haven’t been any exits above, you know, $4 billion or $5 billion, you haven’t seen comps, so that worries me quite a bit,” he said.
“Then I see large technology companies, the largest companies on the planet, with $4 trillion market cap, saying, ‘I don’t want to own this asset. I don’t want to have this on my balance sheet.’ So I ask, Why? Why doesn’t the largest company in the world want to own its own asset?” De Leon said. “The AI business is everything for them today, for the large hyperscalers, and so they’re saying, ‘No, you build it, you finance it.’”
De Leon surmises that what is inside these data centers, the technology of artificial intelligence, will quickly become obsolete. AI, after all, is designed to make everything more efficient, including itself. And the value of the centers is not the four walls, but what’s inside.
These 15- and 20-year leases that developers are relying on, he suspects, are “Swiss cheese” leases — as in, full of holes in the agreement over time.
De Leon said his biggest concern is that big private capital investors are getting the money they manage from things like pension funds for teachers, police and firefighters.
“When they say, ‘I’m going to own this asset and lease it back to one of the hyperscalers,’ they’re putting other people’s money at risk,” he said.
De Leon started in the real estate business as a teenager, working as a translator for a local Texas developer. Instead of getting a salary, he asked for equity in a project. And rather than getting a degree in business, he chose evolutionary biology, because understanding people is good business, he says.
“It was prescient. I mean, it turned out to help me make decisions about organizing companies and leadership, building businesses,” De Leon said. “I think some of these things are about incentives, right? Basic commercial interaction between human beings is about incentives.”
He said that’s particularly true in industries where there are well-established players.
“You always find a status quo group of incumbents that are set up, and they have certain advantages,” he said. “Understanding them from a sociological standpoint, that gave us some insight into saying, ‘OK, this business should compete on this basis. This is where we can win,’ kind of seeing around the corners.”
De Leon said he’s excited about how much more capital is coming in to commercial real estate — from wealth firms, family offices, sovereign wealth funds and pensions.
“When the allocations to real estate go from 3% to 6%, that number means that there’s like $4 trillion more of capital that is chasing a finite number of real estate assets,” he said. “When that happens, you see an oversupply of capital, you’ll see price appreciation for fundamentally sound real estate assets. And so I think the story of the next 10 years will be that the real estate capital markets will grow tenfold.”
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Oracle stock dipped 5% on Wednesday following a report that discussions with Blue Owl Capital on backing a $10 billion data center in Michigan had stalled, although the cloud company later disputed the report.
Blue Owl had been in talks with Oracle about funding a 1-gigawatt facility for OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan, according to the Financial Times.
However, the plans fell through due to concerns about Oracle’s rising debt levels and extensive artificial intelligence spending, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
This comes as some investors raise red flags about the funding behind the rush to build ever more data centers.
The concern is that some hyperscalers are turning to private equity markets rather than funding the buildings themselves, and entering into lease agreements that could prove risky.
Other AI names also sank on Wednesday, with Broadcom down 4%, Nvidia down 3%, AMD down 5% and CoreWeave falling 7%.
Blue Owl did look into the project, but pulled out due to unfavorable debt terms and the structure of repayments, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named in order to discuss a confidential matter.
Blue Owl is still involved in two other Oracle sites, the person said.
The person added that Blue Owl was also concerned that local politics in Michigan would cause construction delays.
Oracle later responded to the FT report, saying the project was moving forward and that Blue Owl was not part of equity talks.
“Our development partner, Related Digital, selected the best equity partner from a competitive group of options, which in this instance was not Blue Owl. Final negotiations for their equity deal are moving forward on schedule and according to plan,” Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said in a statement.
The cloud company did not name the firm involved in current equity talks for the project.
“The notion that Blue Owl walked away is unequivocally false. This is an exceptional project that drew significant interest from equity partners,” Related Digital spokesperson Natalie Ravitz told CNBC.
Ravitz said the equity partner working on the project has “unparalleled expertise in the space” but did not name the firm.
The site, which is expected to begin construction in the first quarter next year, is currently in pre-construction with “strong support” from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, she added.
CNBC has reached out to the FT for comment.
The FT said that Blackstone is in discussions to potentially replace Blue Owl Capital as a financial partner for the data center, although no deal has been signed yet.
Blue Owl Capital has been the primary investor in Oracle’s data center projects in the U.S., including a $15 billion center in Abilene, Texas, and an $18 billion site in New Mexico, the FT said.
“This appears to be a case where the deal simply wasn’t the right one, and seasoned investors understand that success does not require winning every transaction,” Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note on Wednesday.
The bank added that digital infrastructure remains a “core growth vertical” for the Blue Owl, noting an upcoming digital infrastructure fund in 2026 that would add to its $7 billion fund announced in May.
Oracle has $248 billion in lease commitments for data centers and cloud capacity commitments over the next 15 to 19 years as of Nov. 30, the company said in its latest quarterly filing. That is up almost 148% from August.
In September, the cloud computing giant raised $18 billion in new debt, according to an SEC filing. That same month, OpenAI announced a $300 billion partnership with Oracle over the next five years.
By the end of November, the company owed over $124 billion, including operating lease liabilities, according to the filing.
Oracle shares are down about 50% from the high of $345.72 reached in September.
Read the full FT story here.
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