NYT Investigation Details Oracle's Debt-Fueled AI Gamble
Oracle’s capital spending reached $55.66 billion in fiscal 2026, driving free cash flow to negative $23.7 billion and pressuring its debt-laden AI expansion.
- Oracle's fiscal 2026 capital expenditures ballooned to $55.66 billion, flipping free cash flow to negative $23.7 billion and triggering a roughly $494 billion market value decline since September 2025.
- Project Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan over four years, drove the spending surge as Oracle locked $638 billion in Remaining Performance Obligations—a 363% year-over-year increase—into long-dated contracts.
- As of August 2, 2026, Larry Ellison's net worth fell to $181 billion after losing $207 billion, while a federal judge on July 20, 2026 blocked the $110 billion Paramount Skydance merger, imperiling The Ellison Family Trust's $45.7 billion guarantee.
- MacroStrategy Partnership partner Julien Garran argued in October 2025 that AI investment represents a "misallocation of capital" 17 times the dot-com bubble's size and warned capability hit a "scaling wall" since GPT-4 launched.
- S&P Global downgraded Oracle's credit rating, warning the buildout could weaken near-term finances, while Melius Research questions whether spending plans hold if OpenAI or Anthropic scale back compute demand.
19 Articles
19 Articles
Analysis:Oracle Corp goes for high-stakes ratings gamble in AI strategy
LONDON, Aug 4 : Cloud computing giant Oracle Corp is on the cusp of a junk-grade credit rating and its shares have tanked as the artificial intelligence hyperscaler becomes the fall guy of investors' concerns over the sector's debt-fuelled spending binge. The U.S. multinational is an outlier among top softwar
Analysis-Oracle Corp goes for high-stakes ratings gamble in AI strategy
By Vidya Ranganathan LONDON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Cloud computing giant Oracle Corp is on the cusp of a junk-grade credit rating and its shares have tanked as the artificial intelligence hyperscaler becomes the fall guy of investors' concerns over the sec...
Oracle’s Massive AI Bet Has Already Cost Larry Ellison $207 Billion. Analyst Warns the AI Bubble Is 17 Times Bigger Than the Dot-Com Bubble.
Larry Ellison's Oracle gambled its balance sheet on an AI future that analysts are now calling the most dangerous financial bubble in history, and the bill is coming due faster than anyone expected.
(Los Angeles = Yonhap News) Correspondent Kim Kyung-yoon = As concerns over an artificial intelligence (AI) bubble grow, the Silicon Valley company that made the boldest investment...
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