Happily for OpenAI, Oracle had already been sketching plans for a massive data center in West Texas. The original vision had been to partner with Elon Musk’s xAI—the buildings would even be X-shaped, to match the company name, according to people familiar with the negotiations, who asked to remain anonymous discussing them because they were private. Musk is close with Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and chairman, who was on Tesla Inc.’s board for years and has hosted Musk on Lanai, the island in Hawaii he largely owns. Despite that bond, the mercurial Musk had decided he could build something faster on his own and walked away from the project. It was right around then that the fateful LinkedIn message came in.