Link: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/01/oracle-outlines-all-the-ways-it-could-lose-the-farm-it-bet-on-ai/5265438

Risk factors galore

The company's stock is down more than 40 percent in the last month.

iiiinteresting

I was confused by the article. I thought oracle was an AI company like openAI or anthropic. But the article said they lease data centers? Like from other companies or to other companies? Reading comprehension isn't high at the moment, being end of shift of an exhausting night, but can someone ELI5 what exactly it is that they do?

Primarily, they make the Oracle database which they license at extortionate rates to businesses for building literally anything that requires a database. It's arguably the industry standard for relational databases, although it has lost market share over recent decades to open source relational databases like MySQL and Postgres and also, since the 2010s, to the NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB etc. Still, Oracle is a titan, and it's likely that you interact half a dozen times a day with an Oracle database in various businesses and companies without knowing it.

Like all the other big tech companies though, Oracle has been pouring cash into the AI bubble in the form of contracts to build datacentres. They've taken on so much debt to fund their FOMO that they are in real danger of bankrupting themselves. That's where we are today. Compare also to how Microsoft has destroyed any remaining good-will for Windows, and Google has mutilated its golden goose: search. The tech industry players in 5 years time might look quite different to the ones we've had for the last 25.

Fingers crossed.

Stargate, as it stands, will kill Oracle, outside of OpenAI becoming the literal most-profitable and highest-revenue-generating company of all time within the next two years. Even then, by the time that Abilene is built, its 450,000 GB200 GPUs will be two-years-old, and entirely obsolete far before its debts are repaid. A similar fate awaits whatever GPUs are put in the other Stargate data centers.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-openai-kills-oracle/

Awesome, thank you. That clears up a lot, as I've been seeing their name along with the others a lot lately and I had initially thought they were a cloud service when I first heard of em ~4 years ago or so?

Edit: as in cloud originally, that moved into AI.

please please please please please

although it has lost market share over recent decades to open source relational databases like MySQL

Except they own Mysql and offer an Enterprise version of it for $$$.