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On June 19, Oracle representatives walked into the Ozaukee County, Wisconsin courthouse and asked a judge to strike down part of the deal that will power its largest data center.
The filing challenges the May order that sets the terms on which We Energies will serve the roughly one-gigawatt campus going up in Port Washington for the Oracle and OpenAI Stargate partnership. That campus will be the largest data center project in the state’s history, and the financial protections Oracle wants gone are the ones regulators attached to it before letting the deal through.
Those protections come down to two letters. When the Wisconsin Public Service Commission approved We Energies’ new “very large customer” tariff, it required any data center with an S&P rating below A- or a Moody’s rating below A3 to post collateral before taking service: either in cash, a letter of credit, or a guarantee.
That’s stricter than We Energies had initially angled for — and Oracle is the one having to bear the difference. Oracle’s S&P rating is BBB after borrowing heavily to build its AI infrastructure, one notch under the new line. The hyperscaler said that clearing the state’s requirement could mean posting security of more than $100 million a year, against a collateral pool of over $7 billion.
