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S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
- measurablefunc 2mo agoWhat happens when Oracle can't pay the interest on their loans?
- kibwen 2mo agoWhatever happens, I can assure you that the Ellisons will remain multi-billionaires and the American taxpayer will manage to end up poorer, courtesy of their friend in the White House.
- mjcl 2mo agoThey can sell the software business to broadcom.
- dj_axl 2mo agoThey can rent out their AI infra to The Hyperscalers.
- monocasa 2mo agoI think the hyperscalers are smart enough to not let Oracle be their landlord.
- throwa356262 2mo agoAre they? Anthropic is renting compute from a competitor, that also is known for their blackhat business practices.
- monocasa 2mo agoAnthropic isn't a hyperscaler, but instead a hyperscaler customer. And I've seen first hand hyperscalers go to extremely large lengths to eradicate any use of Oracle (which mainly comes in these days through their acquisitions).
- lelanthran 2mo ago> They can rent out their AI infra to The Hyperscalers. I can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcasm or not :-/ Aren't all the token providers right now over-provisioned? They aren't trying to use up all their capacity, they're selling it to one another.
- chrismustcode 2mo agoApart from SpaceXAI no? There's still a massive compute crunch, I know the opencode guys had been struggling to get capacity, Claude effectively lowered it's limit till the SpaceX deal, Google is struggling. https://x.com/thdxr/status/2024539643673211054 https://x.com/thdxr/status/2024539643673211054 https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ai-demand-outstripping-supply-even-131345229.html https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ai-demand-o...
- panzagl 2mo agoThe result would turn into that concentrated evil black lump from Time Bandits
- rawgabbit 2mo agoThey will ask tax payers for a bailout?
- ceejayoz 2mo agoThey'll use their purchases of TikTok and Paramount to campaign for a bailout.
- llm_nerd 2mo agoCampaign? They're friends of the administration, and the US is firmly in the kleptocracy stage now (the last wrungs of democracy are about to be undone this Thursday evening). They'll give a bribe to Trump, they'll offer up 5% of the stock to Chairman Trump as the People's Stock now that the US is basically a bizarre oligarchy form of communism, and Oracle will be declared a state enterprise that cannot lose money. The super rich simply do not fail, and they utterly control every aspect of the US now, exactly as the people apparently wanted. Americans are in a state of profound denial, but things are about to become very real, very quickly.
- ceejayoz 2mo agoThe administration isn't fully immune to public opinion yet.
- triceratops 2mo agoPublic opinion seems immune to reality though.
- platevoltage 2mo agoIf you look back to what he has been able to get away with, and still get re-elected, I'd say he is.
- ceejayoz 2mo agoNah, they tried the invulnerable thing. They tried really, really hard to avoid the "chaos in the White House" firings from the first term. Noem wrecked it.
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- voidfunc 2mo agoTheir competitors eat them. I would not be surprised to see Oracle's cloud business get absorbed by IBM or Microsoft. Maybe Amazon. The extra DC capacity is valuable to a couple companies right now.
- DrProtic 2mo agoThe lenders will then just report missed payments as revenue on their books.
- noncoml 2mo agoWe will be able to afford RAM and SSD again
- hobonation 2mo agoIs it me or do none of the AI companies have a "moat" in the Ben Grahmm sense. I use their services, but I frankly don't care who provides it. I'll chase the chepest/best and have no issue switching from one to another. The only moat I can see is Microsoft providing its services to companies in its Azure system. Nervous IT departments probably like that it's not leaving their control if Bob in the SAP team spins up some AI crap.
- rawgabbit 2mo agoUhh. I actively and vocally avoid all things Microsoft. I see Microsoft and I immediately think buggy software with zero security.
- esikich 2mo agoThat's fine, but your inexperience with large companies that are MS's bread and butter doesn't really give you any credibility here. It's the standard for a reason.
- hobonation 2mo agoCan concur. I hate them with a passion, but corps love them, and I hate to say it... with good reason. They're the only player in the Identity-Document-Email-VM-Storage space that's even remotely unified.
- dragonwriter 2mo agoMaybe so, but you clearly aren’t a representative sample of corporate decision-makers when it comes to AI (or broader IT) services.
- crims0n 2mo agoGoogle has a bit of a Network Effect going... my vehicle got an OTA update to use Gemini. Between that, search, storage, and the YT Premium bundle it was enough to convince me to float a subscription.
- pgn674 2mo agoTitle is inaccurate. They're BBB- now, not BBB.
- wyrdcurt 2mo agoTrue. The linked article's title says that. I wonder if that was a typo by the OP or one of those HN quirks where the title was automatically changed when it shouldn't have been.
- abirch 2mo agoI think there's an errant space in between the BBB and the - but yes, the title is wrong with that space
- dmurvihill 2mo agoI bet the author submitted "to BBB-, one above junk" and an ignorant editor turned the minus into an em dash
- fuzzfactor 2mo agoI would say that the more a company still has plenty of old-fashioned intangible positive corporate goodwill, the bigger the notch. Wouldn't want to be negative at a time like this.
- tflinton 2mo ago[flagged]
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoBond rating is about financial solvency, not goodness.
- Zsfe510asG 2mo agoThere is AI data center overcapacity already. The KOSPI crashed last week, and it's a leading indicator for the cyclical hardware industry. It already had been that indicator in the 2000 bubble. I don't know what possessed Ellison to ruin a functioning company, but it will be interesting if he gets a margin call for ORCL's other debt exposures, which are Ellison's massive loans against his ORCL stock.
- therobots927 2mo agoWell it seems like he bought the “AGI is 2 years away” line. As did… pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley.
- SirFatty 2mo agoyeah.. https://ai-2027.com/ https://ai-2027.com/
- AlexandrB 2mo agoIf/when the AI bubble pops, this website will be really funny. I guess it's already funny. This is what it shows for Apr 2026: > Reliable Agent copies thinking at 13x human speed Still waiting for a reliable agent to think at any speed.
- ben_w 2mo agoI remember one thing that struck me when skim reading that the first time: it only "works" if the government actively does everything in its power to support the boom. No restrictions on new power sources, on pylons and transformers, on new factories to make power sources and compute, on data centres. This was never going to be the world we live in. Still surprised by the admin actively punishing politically incorrect power supplies (renewables) and then starting a stupid war with Iran, but even without that nonsense, we were never going to see the US do a command economy pivot, and even if we had something would've broken like it usually does with noobs (and even most politicians are noobs) trying a command economy pivot.
- 2mo ago
- dralley 2mo agoHere's hoping this screws up the collateralization of the Paramount takeover deal, and the whole thing unravels.
- segmondy 2mo agoI hope not, that would further weigh them down.
- harmmonica 2mo agoI looked this up yesterday triggered by their threat to move the combined company out of CA. Oracle’s stock price, at least, which is way off its 52-week high, is about the same as it was at the time the WBD deal was announced. What does that tell me? Just one of many things about the prospects of the deal still happening. That one in particular says to me they won’t be deterred. Bond rating may suggest the opposite. Lots more complexity than those two things but “fun” to speculate.
- therobots927 2mo agoThis is surprising to me. Judging by what appears to be the common sentiment here on HN - which is that AI inference is already profitable, and OpenAI is fairly valued by private markets. Given that Oracle and Microsoft are major counterparties of OpenAI, it seems odd that their stocks have been performing so poorly recently. Can anyone square this circle for me?
- jimbokun 2mo agoHN has been split on this question, with both pro and con strongly and vigorously argued.
- darkwi11ow 2mo agoInference might be profitable, but it does not mean the profits of AI datacenters will rise in future. Open weight models and local AI already put the pressure on the AI datacenter profit margins, and local AI is set to become much more efficient in the future.
- cmiles8 2mo agoThe general fallacy of the “but inference is profitable” argument is that it tends to ignore all the costs of building and training the model. Given the fact that 1) that’s not trivial, and 2) the arms race underway means one can’t stop training, then it ruins the financial picture. It’s like saying a new apartment building is “profitable” because the monthly income covers the monthly running costs, but ignoring the giant mortgage that covers the cost of building the building. That thinking is a good way to go bankrupt in real estate and a good way to go bankrupt in AI.
- an0malous 2mo ago> The general fallacy of the “but inference is profitable” argument is that it tends to ignore all the costs of building and training the model. Given the fact that 1) that’s not trivial, and 2) the arms race underway means one can’t stop training, then it ruins the financial picture. Or that it’s all hearsay and no one has released financials yet?
- chasil 2mo agoAnd they terminated 30k employees to achieve this? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-massive-30000-layoff-as-ai-spending-surges/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-m...
- LaurensBER 2mo agoWhen we tried to do a pilot with their cloud we couldn't even sign-up. None of the corporate credit cards were accepted. In addition to that the form basically only worked in Edge. We emailed support, they changed something on the backend. It still did not work. We gave up. In retrospective that was a very clear warning sign that their priorities were misguided. I'm glad we did not waste any further time and effort on them.
- csomar 2mo agoGood to know it's not only problematic on the free tier. I wanted to sign up to get the free credits but couldn't finish the setup. I tried again now and it accepted/charged my card ($1 verification test) but then after the account was created it said I need a credit card?
- BoorishBears 2mo agoFor the longest time they were a piñata for free compute with people making multiple accounts for their free ARM instance, but with the AI crunch they're clamping down. I'm guessing they don't care if actual business gets caught up in that because from their POV actual business comes from an account manager, and self-serve is just them cargo culting AWS/GCP
- Ancalagon 2mo agoThey couldn't integrate a payment provider and expect to build out the data centers for AGI? Uh, good luck guys.
- Analemma_ 2mo agoOracle Cloud sometimes feels like an elaborate prank that I'm not in on. I know people and companies on AWS (obviously), Azure, Google Cloud, Hetzner, CloudFlare's various PaaS offerings, etc., but I can't name a single thing running on Oracle Cloud. Somebody out there is clearly using but I'll be damned if I know who it is.
- cmiles8 2mo agoMarket signals on an impending AI bust are broader than just Oracle’s woes. For example, Amazon just had a challenging bond offering where the market is clearly starting to seriously question the ROI on all this money being pumped into AI buildout. That does not bode well at all for AI-only companies without broader cash flow from other businesses. And when the cash dries up this whole thing comes crashing down like a house of cards.
- semiquaver 2mo agoNothing says “full of shit” like someone saying “market is signaling an impending X”. Why not make a huge levered bet and get wildly rich if you think so?
- xienze 2mo agoKnowing "what" will happen is different from knowing "when" it will happen.
- cmiles8 2mo agoBingo
- dragonwriter 2mo agoAlso, even knowing both what will happen and when is a separate thing from having access to capital. You can't really tell that someone posting that hasn't already also taken the biggest leveraged position they can (unless that person is so rich that doing so would itself visibly move the market, which most people who might post comments are not.)
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoThen you don't know it's impending
- pocksuppet 2mo agoIMHO these signals have more to do with the market than AI. They aren't finding AI to be have less ROI than before - they are requiring higher ROI than before, because there is less money remaining to be invested. Managing the total amount of money so that investment bubbles peter out before they get excessively big is supposed to be the central bank's job.
- Apocryphon 2mo agoImagine if their acquisition of TikTok had gone through.
- pocksuppet 2mo agoWait, they don't own US TikTok? Who does?
- Apocryphon 2mo agoI thought it was only 15% of the company.
- thewebguyd 2mo agoTikTok USDS Join Ventures LLC owns 80%, ByteDance still owns a minority stake. Oracle holds 15% & is the hosting provider, Silver Lake has a stake, MGX (UAE state backed firm) owns some as well. But Oracle still manages the content recommendation algorithm and the infrastructure so I'd argue they still have the biggest impact on the platform.
- xyst 2mo agoI can’t wait for Ai bubble to bust already. Maybe it will happen in October/November like the crypto hype.
- Reptur 2mo agoThis site is shady as hell. You try to decline marketing in their pop-up and it hides maybe a 100 providers and expects you to click each one individually.
- rf15 2mo agoThis shady site is an established business created in 1949.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heise_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heise_Group
- thatjoeoverthr 2mo agoSo are all the other shady websites.
- greggoB 2mo agoAll "shady sites" happen to belong to business created in 1949? That's quite the coincidence.
- mangogogo 2mo agoa site can be annoying or shady regardless of who it's from. i was personally very turned off by the heavy-handed popup and resorted to reading a recently archived version of the link.
- iririririr 2mo agopopup? what's this? 1994? who still browses without an adblocker?
- chaitanyya 2mo agoin all our hearts they were always rated CCC
- lelanthran 2mo agoEd Zitron must be feeling quite validated :-)
- bpavuk 2mo agohe is correct on most counts and for the rest I lack the competence to vouch for or denounce his research. a rare sight!
- surgical_fire 2mo agoI like his work. I think he is wrong when he says AI is useless. I agree that it's far from being as useful as assholes like Amodei claim it is, but it clearly has use cases. Then again, that is the weak part of Zitron's argument, and laughably the only thing his critics like to engage. When he brings up the bonkers economics of AI, and how absolutely unsustainable it is, his arguments are very solid. I am still to see one good counter to him there. It's not like he lacks haters who could try.
- nunez 2mo agoI don't think Zitron's argument is that AI is useless so much as that AI in it's current form is unsustainable and maligned with what's good for society long-term (which I agree with).
- bpavuk 2mo agowell, I've been working on the Zig compiler lately, there you have to swear off using AI in any capacity. even your tab-complete, yes. I find that yes, I'm a little slower with regexes instead of GPT mini/Luna models as a find/replace engine, but I am quickly getting grasp of it, and I see the future where I'm faster with Neovim and ripgrep than Codex. the structure of the standard library is super-logical and the code is eye-wateringly readable. I don't even feel the need in, or will to, use Codex in any capacity when working on such a great project. DVUI is also great to work with. that said, I also used to work in environments where even Claude Opus tripped over itself when trying to untangle its own slop. that made me looking forward to AI going bust and folding back into tab-complete. that bubble revealed a lot of projects that always were slop, even before AI. the LLM policy became a great proxy of the quality standard the codebase and the community upholds itself to
- qurren 2mo agoWasn't Tesla rated an F while it was in its hyper growth phase?
- zaik 2mo agoMost sensible Tesla valuation.
- teepo 2mo agoS&P Global link: https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/sourceId/101695609 https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/vie...
- steve1977 2mo agoOh no. Anyway...
- polycancel 2mo ago[dead]
- ratelimitsteve 2mo agopeople have been burning investor money for heat in re: AI for a few years now and it's starting to get chilly...
- minraws 2mo agoIt's still a bunch too high should be below junk imho
- black_13 2mo ago[dead]
- u1hcw9nx 2mo agoOracle LFCF (ttm): -24.54B Levered free cash flow (LFCF) is the cash remaining after a company has paid its debts and operational costs. Oracle has 167.43B debt. $43 billion in last fiscal year. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon will be fine if AI bubble bursts. Oracle will be among first to go down in flames after OpenAI.
- kittikitti 2mo ago“We don’t mind losing customers” Former Oracle CEO on their unwavering support for Israel.
- rcbdev 2mo ago> “We don’t mind losing customers” Former Oracle CEO on their unwavering support for Israel. They'll be fine.
- SwellJoe 2mo agoGood riddance. Maybe if the trash-tier AI plays get knocked out I'll be able to buy memory and GPUs again.
- pedrosuave 2mo agoIs just wild to me people thinking ai is tulip fever or a massive bubble when every part of my life ai is entering. Even these forums 35 percent of posts are ai or vibe code related. At work (medical field) ai is replacing scribes and it can read an ecg better than your average doc. TSMC and chip companies are using in their pipelines. Pharm and bio companies are using. Archeologists are using to decode scrolls and find new petroglyphs. Education and tutoring will never be the same ... kids got lucky having YouTube but now you basically have your private tutor. Vfx is being infiltrated. Computer security. I look around and robots are delivering my food and waymo is picking me up. I turn on the news and in the last couple months Ukraine is now using ai targeting on their drones in addition to the machine vision. My apartment complex recently had a renovations and paint job and my landlord showed me how they designed the color scheme and renovations with chat gpt before getting a crew to do the work. I made an app for my family photography contest for the first time something I never dreamed of at 40 years old with no programming knowledge. I updated my framer website faster than I ever have with Ai. So please explain to me how this is a bubble especially considering that most of these feature are based on llm and not even on how we primarily interact with the world ...visually. the bubble will happen after I can turn on a webcam and the program watches me draw or do a golf swing and gives me realtime tips or i put on some ar glasses and it coaches me at work . The amount of compute needed for graphics real time info is astronomical compared to llm . We are so far from the top of a bubble. The problem with ai in my opinion invest with the mindset that what goes up must come down and if it went up big it must come down hard soon. That's not a rule of nature or anything somethings are bedrock and keep going up. I'm sure when electricity was invented and reached every house maybe some people thought the bubble was over but we keep needing more and more. There is zero evidence now that we will need less ai compute. I think it's logical to be skeptical of chatgpt IPO etc but the sector as a whole is crushing and maybe because of fear will have some hiccups but will certainly prevail for a long time imo
- jghn 2mo agoPeople said similar things leading up to the dot com crash. The commercialization of the internet was indeed a watershed moment. That didn't mean it wasn't a bubble. Both can be true at the same time.
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- PedroBatista 2mo agoOld samurai lost his marbles and his heir to the throne is busy making kingdom ending deals pretending to be an Hollywood mogul. Life is good, I guess.. Java people should start sweating.