Oracle’s $300 Billion AI Bet Has Fast Become a Bubble Barometer
Silicon Valley is in the midst of another epic boom, and Larry Ellison has Oracle right at the center of it, for better or worse.
Ellison.
Photo illustration: Danielle Del Plato for Bloomberg Businessweek; photos: Alamy; Getty Images
The biggest cloud-computing deal in history had the humblest of origins: an unsolicited direct message over LinkedIn. It was sent in spring 2024 from an executive at OpenAI to sales leaders at Oracle Corp. Like most LinkedIn inquiries, it was a bit of a flyer.
OpenAI was scrambling for computing power, as it has been more or less constantly since its artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022. It had been busy signing huge deals to rent data center space, buying the specialized AI processors known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, and trying to develop its own chips. Nothing it did was enough to meet its insatiable hunger for processing power. OpenAI, in short, was desperate.