where its sits with the AI bubble I think Oracle is the 1 of the major companies apart from the OpenAI that would go belly up once the AI bubble crashes.
Larry has embedded the company way too deeply into the intelligence and military apparatus to ever go belly up. He’d be first in line for a government handout.
And he'd take a good chunk of that money for himself, and a good amount of that to also "donate" to a foreign, nuclear-armed, hostile country's "defense" force. But don't you dare question him.
I did a project for a big telecom in Brazil where they kept everything in one massive Oracle database that ran out of 2 oracle refrigerators[1]. They kept freaking logs on the database, like normal application level logs.
DBA would go around screaming if you were logging too much stuff. I assumed they had some sort of periodic cleanup because I couldn't see that stuff being practical long term.
Technically it was 2 databases, one was a read replica for longer running data analysis of course.
That telecom has at least 100 million paying customers (maybe much more). I don't see they ever moving away from Oracle, they are more likely to go bankrupt than ever leaving.
True, but they also took huge debts to build AI DCs and not sure if the DB part of the company can cushion such a fall. According to [1] their IaaS line of business brings 4.8B USD/quarter (so say 20B/year), but they have ~120B of debt (outstanding + new debt they are trying to find people to pay for).
They are justifying that on commitments (500+B USD), but 300B of those are tied to OpenAI. So, if OpenAI goes belly up or at least doesn't follow their crazy growth projections, they would have to find the same amount of consumption quickly to repay the interest on said debt and eventually the principal.
It is a lot of money for a company the size of Oracle (~500B market cap).
They are not. Maybe they will be treated as such if the bubble bursts while while Trump is in power, because of loyalties.
But Oracle could relatively easily be broken up and sold off. Essentially all of the global consulting business units could sell to competitors in the various niches, the hardware business and the cloud hosting business could be separated, etc.
Plenty of companies worldwide would be up for buying pieces of Oracle at a bargain price.
"Too big to fail" only really applies in extreme circumstances (which might happen, admittedly) and with essentially monolithic businesses (or banking).
I don't think even Microsoft is too big to fail.
And I don't think people should casually entertain the idea that really any tech industry company is too big to fail, because tech corporations that cannot die point the way to a Rollerball future.
Some of the shakier dot com companies did, though.
And the dot com bubble collapse of Nortel and Worldcom shows that even well-established companies with significant non-bubble investments are vulnerable if the companies make poor economic decisions (in both of those cases, the collapse was driven by excessively aggressive acquisitions).
Likewise, LLM's won't disappear completely with a stock market crash. But the weaker players might.