After spending a year making it clear that it believes AI will drive its future growth, Oracle’s stock is now facing its worst quarter since the dog days of the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.
Oracle shares have cratered about 30% so far this quarter after peaking in September, when the company announced new data center projects tied to OpenAI. The stock is now on track for its steepest quarterly drop in more than two decades, CNBC notes.
Wall Street appears to be growing more skeptical that the data software company’s expensive bet on AI will pay off anytime soon, if it ever does at all. Delayed projects and weak earnings results have sent its stock sliding in recent months.
Oracle shares hit an all-time high in September after the company said it was building additional data centers as part of OpenAI’s massive Stargate project.
Those new data centers, along with Stargate’s flagship site in Abilene, Texas, and other ongoing projects, would bring the initiative to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than $400 billion in investment over the next three years. Three of the new data centers are being developed by Oracle
The Stargate project was first announced back in January, shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, during a press conference at the White House. The event was attended by Trump ally Larry Ellison, who serves as Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
But earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Oracle is delaying some of its OpenAI data center projects by at least a year due to labor and material shortages, triggering a sell-off in the company’s stock.
Additionally, investors were left unimpressed with Oracle’s most recent earnings report at the end of November. The company posted weaker-than-expected revenue while its capital expenditures surged.
On the earnings call, Oracle’s finance chief Doug Kehring said the company expects to spend $50 billion in fiscal 2026 capital expenditures—money spent on long-term assets like buildings, tech, and equipment. That figure is roughly double what the company spent a year ago. In order to fund these costly projects, the company raised $18 billion in a bond sale in September, a move that also significantly increased its debt load.
In October, Oracle announced ambitious plans to grow its revenue to $225 billion by fiscal year 2030, up from $57 billion in 2025, with much of that growth expected to come from AI infrastructure. With some projects now delayed, it remains an open question whether the company can still hit that target.
Meanwhile, Oracle’s core software business is already showing signs of strain. Software revenue fell 3% to $5.88 billion in the third quarter.
Still, Oracle is betting that its massive AI spending will eventually pay off. But with projects delayed, debt rising, and investors already growing restless, that bet is starting to look much riskier than it did just a few months ago.
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