mfriedenhagen (@mfriedenhagen.mastodontech.de.ap.brid.gy)

Oracle sells enterprise databases. It’s a very solid business. They have so many corporate and government deals that Larry Ellison doesn’t even slightly have to pretend to be human any more. But Ellison got greedy and did a deal in September for OpenAI to pay Oracle _three hundred billion_ dollars for data centres over the next five years. [_WSJ_ _,__archive_] The Oracle share price went through the roof! On 9 September, it was $241. On 10 September, $328! All time high! Now, you might think: hold on, OpenAI’s job is to burn money. They claimed $10 billion annualised revenue as of June last year. Where’s OpenAI going to get $60 billion a year to pay Oracle from? Well, Sam Altman’s confident he’ll work something out. Everyone in the world will buy enough ChatGPT to pay the bill! You just watch. Putting Oracle this close to the OpenAI money bonfire is not working out so well for Oracle. They just got sued by bondholders today. Oracle has always been the cloud provider you don’t want. You go to Amazon for stuff that works, you go to Azure if you’re running Windows or you hate yourself — or both — you go to Google if you hate getting customer service, and you go to Oracle if you think a deal with Larry Ellison ends any other way than a fiery pit, getting poked at with pitchforks by demons. (Oracle’s lawyers.) But Oracle really wants cloud business, and they think Stargate’s their big chance. Oracle has told Wall Street analysts they expect $166 billion each year in cloud revenue by 2030 — but most of that imaginary number is OpenAI. In a deal that assumes OpenAI gets more venture capital funding than exists in the world. And doesn’t die. [_FT_] Oracle’s stock price gains from the OpenAI deal were reversed by November. Tech stocks had a dip around this time — but no-one dipped as badly as Oracle. It almost looks like an OpenAI deal may not be stock market magic any more. [_FT_ _,__archive_] Oracle’s money guys are getting cold feet. The deal for a one-gigawatt Stargate data centre in Saline Township in Michigan may be off — Blue Owl Capital said in December they wouldn’t get the $10 billion together to build the thing. Though Oracle swore the next day that the data centre’s still happening. [_FT_ _,__archive_ _;__press release_] Finally, just today, Oracle got sued by bondholders, led by the Ohio Carpenters’ Pension Plan. Oracle had issued $18 billion in bonds in September to pay for its big Stargate plans. The people who lent Oracle that $18 billion are not happy, because Oracle offered another $38 billion in data centre bonds in October. And market unease over Oracle’s debt levels made the September bonds drop in price badly. [_Bloomberg_ _,__archive_ _;__Bloomberg_ _,__archive_] The bondholders say the September offering documents were “false and misleading” because they didn’t mention the October plans which crashed the price. This has been filed as a class action, but it’s a big class action with a serious backer. Oracle stock is at $191 today, which is down 21% on the $241 it was in September — before the OpenAI deal. Larry Ellison is not a stupid man. He can count. He’s quite capable of looking at OpenAI’s numbers and going “waaait a minute.” But somehow, he was fooled by _Sam Altman_. * _Video_ _—_ _Podcast_ ### Share this post: * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/15/bondholders-sue-oracle-over-openai-debt-deals/