Five Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Larry Ellison’s A.I. Gamble

“The billionaire’s company took on ominous loads of debt to build data centers around the world. The implications go far beyond Oracle.

 

Last September, Larry Ellison briefly became the richest person in the world, after steering Oracle, the data and software storage company he founded, into the new world of A.I.

 

But Ellison’s big bet on A.I. was built on an astronomical amount of debt — with implications far beyond the company.

 

How did Ellison, at 81, go from being the star of the first formal news conference of the second Trump administration — where the president announced “the largest A.I. infrastructure project by far in history” and said his friend Larry Ellison was just the man to get it done — to the richest person in the world to the most vulnerable player in the increasingly volatile A.I. game?

 

We reported from Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Hawaii and New York; interviewed dozens of people close to Ellison and Oracle, as well as financial analysts and former national security officials; and reviewed financial filings, analyst reports and court records.

 

Our investigation shows how Ellison, basking in a quieter existence on his own private Hawaiian island just a few years ago, was so startled by the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 that he took back control of Oracle, courted the Trump administration (which eased restrictions and ignored laws barring his way) and took on increasingly ominous loads of debt — to bet everything on A.I.

 

Here are five takeaways from our article in The Times Magazine.

 

Ellison was desperate not to get left behind in the A.I. gold rush.

 

Ellison’s effort began in late 2022, when the launch of ChatGPT set in motion a race to control the most transformative new technology since the dawn of the internet. Ellison had been enjoying life on his Hawaiian island, having children with his decades-younger partner, but once he grasped what the moment held, he began a two-year scramble to remake Oracle as an A.I. juggernaut.

 

By last fall, on a conference call with analysts, reflecting on the pivot he’d steered Oracle into, Ellison said that “not everyone fully grasps the extent of the tsunami that is approaching.” As far as he was concerned, he did.

 

Ellison moved to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of few companies providing the data centers powering the A.I. boom.

 

Oracle had spent several years building out its cloud-storage infrastructure, but to go big on A.I., it would have to build entirely new and much larger data centers. Oracle’s main rivals in this new field — Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — were much bigger and better capitalized. If Oracle was going to keep up, it would have to borrow a lot of money.

 

By last summer, Oracle had finalized a deal to build data centers across the country and then lease the computing power to OpenAI to train its A.I. models. OpenAI would pay Oracle $300 billion over roughly five years, beginning in 2027. Oracle’s stock surged by 43 percent. Ellison’s personal wealth soared to nearly $400 billion, and on one day, at least, he was the richest person in the world.

 

Oracle has become a major supplier of A.I. computing power to China.

 

The United States had one major advantage in the A.I. race: China lagged behind in computer chip technology. The Biden administration cut off Chinese access to American-made chips, but China could still obtain computing power remotely through other countries.

 

In 2024, Oracle made a $6.5 billion deal to build an enormous data center complex in Malaysia from which it could supply computing power to ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, and other foreign companies. Oracle’s facility in Malaysia was soon on track to become the second-biggest in the world, providing by one estimate more than one-fifth of China’s total A.I. computing power. Ellison is now fueling the A.I. ambitions of America’s biggest geopolitical rival.

 

Ellison’s bet on A.I. is built on a mountain of debt.

 

Oracle agreed to take on much of the financial burden of building out the data centers that OpenAI would use. In the last few months of 2025, the company borrowed billions of dollars to finance the continuing construction. At the start of 2026, Oracle had more debt than all of its far larger competitors.

 

Oracle’s annual report in June acknowledged that it could not guarantee that it would be able to manage its outstanding debt. Oracle has pushed the limits of the credit market, facing steeper interest rates from lenders; its credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above “junk” status.

 

By late July, Oracle’s stock was down 60 percent from its peak last year. Ellison’s own fortune is largely bound up in Oracle’s cratering stock.

 

The growing risk is not just to Ellison and Oracle, but to the U.S. economy itself.

 

The A.I. boom has been driving the entire U.S. economy. Since the release of ChatGPT, A.I.-related stocks have been responsible for as much as 75 percent of the returns of the S&P 500, and data centers now account for a vast majority of America’s G.D.P. growth.

 

Oracle and the other hyperscalers also now dominate the debt and equity markets, and investors and analysts are increasingly asking whether the huge investments being made in A.I. are sustainable and will ever return the promised profits.

 

Americans are more heavily invested in the stock market than ever before. By one estimate, an A.I. crash could wipe out $20 trillion in American wealth — far more than the dot-com crash in 2000 or even the 2008 financial crisis.” [1]

 

The Chinese are winning the AI ​​and robotics competition. Since Ellison is working with the Chinese, his investments will survive if he can get out in time. The same cannot be said for OpenAI and Anthropic investments.

 

1. Five Takeaways From the Times Investigation Into Larry Ellison’s A.I. Gamble. Mahler, Jonathan; Rutenberg, Jim; Grind, Kirsten.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 31, 2026.