Finding out that Oracle has a bond rating of BBB- [1] (one step above junk bonds) feels very appropriate for such a company with such a sordid history.
Right, Oracle is at the bottom of the heap (they borrowed the most with the least initial credibility— who the fuck seriously thinks Oracle was ever going to be a major player in AI), so weakness in the market will appear with them first. But I think it will bubble its way up.
Oracle's specialty is extracting money from the government for everything IT-related. Why wouldn't they be a major player? Investors might not have foreseen DOGE and Grok.
> Oracle was ever going to be a major player in AI
Stupidity on the behalf of management to get into AI at any cost even if it means becoming a land-lord of AI data-centers. This is what a mania looks like. They have good company with allbirds and other crypto-miner-turned datacenter operators. At the backend of this, these operators will be cleaned out, and sold to the highest bidders and that explains why microsoft is renting capacity, because they know at some point in the future there will be foreclosures, and they can buy on the cheap.
Will be interesting to see what excuses these companies will come up with to justify stopping investment in AI without spelling it out. The first one was already announced: it's going to kill everyone so we need to proceed more slowly.
Interesting. I had been interpreting "it's too dangerous; make us slow down" as hype to get more investment and/or customers. "We don't have the money to build out" is an interesting alternate interpretation.
I see it as "make regulation that will throttle our competition (especially foreign one)" mixed with "look at us, our AI so advanced" pre-IPO advertising
Both are reasonable, but the recent hype around all the cyberattacks seems far more aggressive and specifically them arguing that they need to slow down for safety sounds very suspiciously like trying to come up with a reason for slowing progress.
Due to the difficulty of building and the time lead, there will be a multiple of applications for every data center that actually comes to fruition.
But if you're talking about the capital investment that's being talked about as too high, I would agree that it's way too high, as all these big tech breakthroughs result in too much building at first. Which hurts the builder's profitability but helps consumers.
No shit, you're telling me mixing Trump, Musk, Oracle and Softbank would end up in yet another scam? Just a way to quickly pump stocks and get money? No way duuude, who would have thought?!
Everyone is interpreting this as a sign the bubble is bursting, when the actual story is costs for materials and labor are going up and delays are happening because so many data centers are getting built.
If Oracle was able to build the data center under-cost and faster than expected, that would be a better sign the bubble was bursting!
"No one could have predicted that permits and infrastructure necessary for this project's completion would be delayed". Except for every project that's needed permits and infrastructure ever.
Force majeure can be defined within contracts. So if the contract said that force majeure included changes in law or failure to receive permits, then it's force majeure. There can also be a separate "change in law" provision.
One can't say whether it's valid or not without reading the actual contract and looking at the state's case law.
It's easier to pay back the loans if they don't spend the money in the first place. This sounds like they can't spend the money, so paying it back should be easy, not hard.
It costs about 4x to insure against Oracle’s credit risk as it does against a generic North American investment-grade issuer [1]. That divergence is almost entirely a product of 2026.
I really don't get who keeps using Oracle outside of Java, and how they make their money, must be some legacy contracts or something, but Oracle has always been customer hostile, from all the things I've heard, they sound like a ransomware company (idk if they still do it, but they'd sell you the database, then "audit you" and if you used anything that wasn't in compliance, fine you, until you converted that to Oracle DB too or whatever wild stuff). I just don't get it. I get even less how its execs are okay running what could be a much more successful company so poorly. You can change Oracle for the better and become even more profitable if you change how you do business.
Take Java as a solid example, they removed JavaFX from the core of Java, which made everyone think JavaFX was dead, recently they started providing enterprise support for JavaFX, which signals its production ready, but, who wants to trust Oracle? I sure don't. I can use C# for free without any of that baggage, and if I get all sorts of stable options for a GUI, and with Avalonia (and Uno?) I can run my GUI on any OS.
"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.
Every enterprise company I've worked for that used Oracle either completely migrated from it or is / was in the process of doing so, which is why I asked my question. I don't see startups lining up to do Oracle either, not in the way old businesses used to.
I’ve been on some teams where some SQL devs can do some non intuitive things with SQL (particularly some of the enterprise features from Oracle). Not saying they were the right decisions but I do think some processes get knitted to these enterprise features and it’s painful to walk back later
I've had this same experience with Oracle shops. I've been in data roles for most of the last 20 years and it'd still give me pause to take work on an Oracle platform if only because they're doing their own thing so often.
It's only relatively recently (in the lifespan of large companies) that OSS alternatives have come along that can do much more of what Oracle can do. Oracle was miraculous for a long time. It was also a huge pain to operate (source: I know people who've operated it), particularly in its RAC configuration, but if you could operate it you could run a bank and rely pretty well on Oracle being rock solid.
That's fair, I'm not trying to knock on them for their tech, I'm sure some of it is solid, though Java felt like it hit a wall for years (only in like 2023 did it finally start catching up to C#... and remember Kotlin was made specifically because Java was just so... behind on so much).
In all fairness, the JVM is insanely optimized, and .NET and the JVM are neck and neck, but language feature wise C# felt nicer to work with. I guess its a blessing in disguise, it allowed C# to gain a lot of usage. :)
I agree about the JVM. I think the big difference between C# and Java is just that C# has allowed breaking changes, and so has improved various things at the language level. Java hasn't really.
You don't have experience from corporate environment. Oracle is very much present, alive and kicking there, in 1000 and 1 little or big applications, sometimes even out of convenience and cost (is you have just 1 DBA team supporting oracle, adding even 1 postgres to production system could be a cost nightmare to support and manage.
And SQL DBs are not going anywhere in next few decades.
Zipcar started in 2000/2001 on Oracle and relied heavily on stored procedures, particularly in billing (as SaaS didn't exist back when it started and was a bad fit for a long time). It took an entire rewrite of the system to get off of Oracle.
> You don't have experience from corporate environment.
Thank you for redefining my entire career, in fact, everywhere I've worked at as a developer, if they ever used Oracle either migrated completely away from it or are in / were in the process of migrating from it, including Fortune 500 companies. Which is why I asked what I asked. I'm genuinely curious.
Possible, but I guess my view comes from: Usually startups don't line up for Oracle as far as I can tell, and new companies don't line up for Oracle (I'm separating this from startups because you can have a brick and mortar that's modernizing and bringing tech in-house), so if their customer base keeps leaving and they are only retaining some of their customers... It's not really looking good from where I'm standing. To be extremely fair, I think Oracle has drastically more potential than what they do today, and could even become extremely dominant, but they're not playing those cards at all, and its kind of a shame. They've got plenty of funds to make the JDK and programming in general more interesting, and they would stand to profit from it since who wouldnt want to hire Oracle consultants on their tech if they need key consultants? I know people pay top dollar for Microsoft consultants to get their startups going.
No, they wouldn't. Microsoft never lost any significant business when their products, including Windows, had significantly worse security than everything else.
Nobody will be faulted for using the dominant product or service. Everybody is in the same boat. What gets you into trouble is going out on a limb and choosing some niche product. Even if it has significantly better overall security, a single incident becomes your problem, whereas 100 incidents with Oracle is simultaneously everybody's problem and nobody's problem.
The answer is clearly and resoundingly no. Honestly don't know how you typed that question out with the current state of corporate (ir)responsibility towards cybersecurity.
Oracle Database is still the gold standard for data in an enterprise setting. Postgres is great, but it doesn't have the clustering or replication capabilities, or support, that Oracle does.
When you're talking about business, the software itself doesn't really matter at all. Accountability is everything. There has to be a throat you can choke, an ass you can drag onto the carpet, when it fails. That is the reason why Oracle persists as an organization: they assume accountability for the data storage layer, freeing their clients to worry about other things.
I think all their recent layoffs show that nobody uses oracle, and the data centers for open ai are their last best hope for future revenue.
Nobody picks oracle anymore, and everybody who's using oracle wishes they were off it and is working on projects to detach themselves from paying oracle heaps of money for software that's no better than open source alternatives.
oracle's database is still a good product, with a lot of features that don't have analogs in open source db products. You can live without them, but still, it's a nice database.
Good product ... not really. It has some nice features but it is user hostile, buggy and with a bad manual. Running the Oracle database was quite shocking, surprisingly low quality.
Government contracts, size and momentum, they're pretty famous for being ruthless on the upsell and counting licenses very carefully. They use their size to absorb other entities (like people soft who let the FBI's data go missing onto the dark web just recently [1]) they all uses databases and need datacenters. The government needs to manage big sets of data for whatever reason, Oracle is essential to that mission, bingo-bango too big to fail!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805278
I realize there’s a lot of hate in this thread, but I think there’s another side to this.
Force majeure is basically there for situations where something outside a company’s control prevents them from delivering on a contract.
I can see Oracle’s argument here. A number of states and local governments that were originally very supportive of new data centers, including places like Texas and Pennsylvania, have since started blocking or restricting new construction.
If Oracle signed these contracts assuming they could build the capacity, and the government later changed the rules and stopped those projects from moving forward, it’s hard to argue they should still be held to the same delivery commitments.
(That seems pretty close to the type of situation force majeure is meant for.)
In that case, would the people caught unemployed and with upside down loans in the 2008 financial crisis would have a reasonable argument for "force majeure" to cancel their mortgages? ... After all, they had a reasonable expectation that the economy would continue to support their employment, either with their current employer or by finding a new job that paid just as well?
at some point the phrases loses its meaning if it becomes applicable to pretty much anything.
A reasonably-written contract would have weasel words in it - something like "subject to zoning approval, and approval of the needed power and water and etcetera". Oracle has very expensive lawyers; they should have had those clauses in there.
Still, you write those for the known possible obstacles. Having the state government change the ground rules may not have been one of your known possibles. So, yeah, I could see force majeure being at least possibly reasonable.
Did they, or was it found that they had ignored them and are now being forced to follow the law? Those state and local governments were so supportive that the processes for approvals and reviews was all done in secret and without necessary inputs. You know, the things the laws in those areas said you had to do.
In this particular project, it looks like Oracle and Blue Owl Capital singed the contract before state regulators reviewed and provided necessary approvals.
A hurricane wipes out your data center and someone sues you for it not being finished on time. Thats what force majeure is for.
You made a series of bad business decisions != force majeure.
As the AI bubble starts to pop we’re going to see a lot of creative claims as everyone rushes for the exits and the debt bomb behind all this infra lights off.
force majeure may not cover you even in the case of hurricanes.
the idea is that force majeure is for things that you could not forsee, could not plan for, and could not stop even if you were aware.
if your company sets up shop in a hurricane prone area but then fails to keep servers in other colo / cloud locations -- and then goes down cuz a hurricane inevitably hits Florida, you absolutely can get sued and lose.
My recollection from law school is that force majeure is more like a specific subset of "impossibility of performance", which is to say it's not generally the same as "something outside a company's control."
I can’t see what the event that has caused a force majeure claim is, though local opposition is not unexpected in any infrastructure buildout - I would be surprised if that is permitted / accepted.
All the reporting is about delaying payments, not a good look, and definitely undermines the FM claim. FM generally speaking needs something truly in expected and outside of control - COVID / maybe a literal war in the region your a working in. Increased cost exposure and push back from local opposition would not clear the FM bar in my experience.
Why didn't they select a site closer to the natural gas instead of 17 miles away? Ellison is wealthy enough, he could have bought his own gas field, and plumbed directly from there to the blooms.
106 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] thread[1] https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/vie...
Stupidity on the behalf of management to get into AI at any cost even if it means becoming a land-lord of AI data-centers. This is what a mania looks like. They have good company with allbirds and other crypto-miner-turned datacenter operators. At the backend of this, these operators will be cleaned out, and sold to the highest bidders and that explains why microsoft is renting capacity, because they know at some point in the future there will be foreclosures, and they can buy on the cheap.
But if you're talking about the capital investment that's being talked about as too high, I would agree that it's way too high, as all these big tech breakthroughs result in too much building at first. Which hurts the builder's profitability but helps consumers.
https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...
If Oracle was able to build the data center under-cost and faster than expected, that would be a better sign the bubble was bursting!
I hope whoever buys Oracle fires Larry by email.
I certainly hope not; you can't fire[1] someone via email.
============================
[1] Out of a canon. Into the sun.
Takes to much delta-V. Like... a lot of delta-V. Shooting out of the solar system takes less energy. #begreen
I'm assuming this is a reference to the classic Clarke and Dawe skit:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke_and_Dawe
One can't say whether it's valid or not without reading the actual contract and looking at the state's case law.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/oracle-cite...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/82dbd39c-f8dd-4ef1-8a80-d430a2257...
> "Oracle signed a deal with solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) developer Bloom last year for 1.8GW of power, expanding it to 2.8GW of capacity in April."
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-mexico-regula...
Apparently this one would have been the largest SOFC installation, by far.
Take Java as a solid example, they removed JavaFX from the core of Java, which made everyone think JavaFX was dead, recently they started providing enterprise support for JavaFX, which signals its production ready, but, who wants to trust Oracle? I sure don't. I can use C# for free without any of that baggage, and if I get all sorts of stable options for a GUI, and with Avalonia (and Uno?) I can run my GUI on any OS.
You can still use OpenJFX with OpenJDK, can't you?
"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.
And SQL DBs are not going anywhere in next few decades.
Thank you for redefining my entire career, in fact, everywhere I've worked at as a developer, if they ever used Oracle either migrated completely away from it or are in / were in the process of migrating from it, including Fortune 500 companies. Which is why I asked what I asked. I'm genuinely curious.
Perhaps you and employers that happen to stick with Oracle aren't looking for the same thing?
There is plenty of $$$ at the top, at the moment.
Oracle Cloud offers them some long term strategy.
https://www.404media.co/we-hacked-the-fbi-hackers-say-they-h...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/22/hacking-group-shinyhunters...
Nobody will be faulted for using the dominant product or service. Everybody is in the same boat. What gets you into trouble is going out on a limb and choosing some niche product. Even if it has significantly better overall security, a single incident becomes your problem, whereas 100 incidents with Oracle is simultaneously everybody's problem and nobody's problem.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/shi...
Btw I hate oracle but they’ve got their business model down to a T.
When you're talking about business, the software itself doesn't really matter at all. Accountability is everything. There has to be a throat you can choke, an ass you can drag onto the carpet, when it fails. That is the reason why Oracle persists as an organization: they assume accountability for the data storage layer, freeing their clients to worry about other things.
Nobody picks oracle anymore, and everybody who's using oracle wishes they were off it and is working on projects to detach themselves from paying oracle heaps of money for software that's no better than open source alternatives.
The substance of the contracts is an afterthought.
Force majeure is basically there for situations where something outside a company’s control prevents them from delivering on a contract.
I can see Oracle’s argument here. A number of states and local governments that were originally very supportive of new data centers, including places like Texas and Pennsylvania, have since started blocking or restricting new construction.
If Oracle signed these contracts assuming they could build the capacity, and the government later changed the rules and stopped those projects from moving forward, it’s hard to argue they should still be held to the same delivery commitments.
(That seems pretty close to the type of situation force majeure is meant for.)
at some point the phrases loses its meaning if it becomes applicable to pretty much anything.
I don’t think Oracle is proposing they get a data center they didn’t finish paying for.
Still, you write those for the known possible obstacles. Having the state government change the ground rules may not have been one of your known possibles. So, yeah, I could see force majeure being at least possibly reasonable.
Did they, or was it found that they had ignored them and are now being forced to follow the law? Those state and local governments were so supportive that the processes for approvals and reviews was all done in secret and without necessary inputs. You know, the things the laws in those areas said you had to do.
In this particular project, it looks like Oracle and Blue Owl Capital singed the contract before state regulators reviewed and provided necessary approvals.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-mexico-regula...
And not seeking necessary regulatory approval doesn't really seem like things 'beyond their control.'
You made a series of bad business decisions != force majeure.
As the AI bubble starts to pop we’re going to see a lot of creative claims as everyone rushes for the exits and the debt bomb behind all this infra lights off.
the idea is that force majeure is for things that you could not forsee, could not plan for, and could not stop even if you were aware.
if your company sets up shop in a hurricane prone area but then fails to keep servers in other colo / cloud locations -- and then goes down cuz a hurricane inevitably hits Florida, you absolutely can get sued and lose.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
All the reporting is about delaying payments, not a good look, and definitely undermines the FM claim. FM generally speaking needs something truly in expected and outside of control - COVID / maybe a literal war in the region your a working in. Increased cost exposure and push back from local opposition would not clear the FM bar in my experience.
We have to stop shielding and bailing out companies(ans banks) when their bet fails.
More broadly, Force majeure refers to an act of God or such outside of human control.