Artificial Intelligence · Profile from AI Research Companion
Oracle
The database company Larry Ellison co-founded in 1977, which arrived late and small to cloud computing, rebuilt its infrastructure cloud (OCI) from scratch in 2016–18, and then turned it into the fastest-growing AI compute supplier of 2024–26 by renting giant GPU clusters to model labs, above all OpenAI. A reported ~$300bn, roughly five-year OpenAI contract (September 2025) lifted Oracle's remaining performance obligations (RPO) to ~$455bn, sent its shares up ~36% in a day and briefly made Ellison the world's richest person (reported). It also turned Oracle into the most leveraged of the big AI builders: by mid-2026 it carried ~$117bn of debt (reported), had negative free cash flow, guided to ~$90–95bn of gross capex for the year to May 2027, and its credit default swaps had widened to record levels (reported). RPO reached ~$664bn in August 2026 (company, reported). Oracle is the purest test in this knowledge base of whether backlog from one customer is an asset or a credit exposure.
At a glance
- Founded
- June 1977, Santa Clara, California, as Software Development Laboratories, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates; renamed Oracle (after its database product) in 1982–83; public since March 1986
- Headquarters
- Austin, Texas (since December 2020); Ellison has said a Nashville campus will become its world headquarters (2024, reported)
- Ownership / structure
- Public (NYSE: ORCL). Larry Ellison owns ~40% of the shares (reported, verify current stake), making Oracle effectively founder-controlled
- Leadership (2026)
- Larry Ellison (co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer); Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia (co-CEOs since September 22, 2025); Safra Catz (executive vice chair; CEO 2014–2025, co-CEO with Mark Hurd until 2019) (company)
- AI products
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) GPU superclusters (Nvidia, AMD); OCI Generative AI service (Cohere, Meta Llama, xAI Grok and other models); Oracle Database 23ai/26ai with vector search; AI agents inside Fusion and NetSuite applications; Oracle Health clinical AI; Oracle Database@Azure/AWS/Google Cloud
- Scale
- Revenue ~$57.4bn (FY2025, to May 2025, company); ~$19.3bn (+30%) in the August 2026 quarter, with OCI ~$7.4bn (+121%) (company, reported); RPO ~$455bn (August 2025), ~$523bn (November 2025), ~$664bn (August 2026) (company, reported); FY2027 revenue guided to at least ~$90bn (reported)
- Capex
- ~$7bn (FY2024); ~$21bn (FY2025); ~$55.7bn (FY2026, against a ~$50bn plan); ~$90–95bn gross, ~$70bn net of customer prepayments, guided for FY2027 (June 2026, reported, verify)
- Debt and funding
- ~$18bn bond (September 2025); ~$43bn of debt and ~$5bn of equity raised in FY2026; ~$117bn of debt by mid-2026, the largest non-financial issuer in the Bloomberg US high-grade index (reported); ~$40bn debt-and-equity plan for FY2027 including an at-the-market equity programme of up to $20bn (June 2026, reported); project-level financing for data centres built by partners (Crusoe, Vantage, Related Digital and others)
- Key AI partnerships
- OpenAI (Stargate; ~4.5 GW and a reported ~$300bn contract); SoftBank, MGX (Stargate equity partners); Nvidia and AMD (GPUs; AMD MI450 deployment from 2026); Crusoe (Abilene campus developer); Microsoft (OpenAI overflow capacity, Database@Azure); Meta (~$20bn compute deal, reported September 2025); Cohere, xAI and other model providers; G42 (Stargate UAE)
- Signature moves (incl. failures)
- OCI Gen2, the second-chance cloud (2018); GPU clusters and the AI pivot (2023–24); OpenAI capacity via Azure on OCI (2024); the Stargate joint venture (2025); the OpenAI ~$300bn contract and RPO surge (2025); the move to co-CEOs (2025); the debt-funded build-out and the credit-spread warning (2025); the dropped Abilene expansion and the FY2027 capital raise (2026)
8 strategic moves analysed
Each one gets a full strategy file in the companion: context, the decision, the financing, what happened, and the lesson.
2018
OCI Gen2 Second Chance Cloud
Launch / pivot (rebuild of a failed product)
2023
Nvidia GPU Clusters and the AI Pivot
Partnership / compute deal (repositioning OCI as an AI compute supplier)
2024
OpenAI Azure Extension on OCI
Compute deal (three-party capacity arrangement)
2025
CEO Transition to Co CEOs
Restructuring (leadership succession)
2025
Debt Funded Build Out and Credit Spreads
Funding (debt) and capital expenditure programme
2025
OpenAI 300bn Contract and the RPO Surge
Compute deal (multi-year capacity contract)
2025
Stargate Joint Venture
Partnership / compute deal (joint venture announced at the White House)
2026
Abilene Expansion Dropped and FY27 Capital Raise
Restructuring (site plan change) / funding (debt and equity)