Oracle is burning hundreds of billions to finance AI datacenters for the likes of OpenAI. Now, the company is admitting they may not pay off.

Amid the usual boilerplate, Big Red cited numerous risk factors related to its AI infrastructure investments in a regulatory filing published late last month.

“To grow our OCI business, which requires increased computing capacity, we must incur significant capital and operating expenditures to increase our existing data center capacity and to establish data centers in new geographic locations,” the filing reads, using the TLA for "Oracle Cloud Infrastructure."

These investments, the company notes, are tied to long-term commitments for infrastructure and datacenter capacity. Unlike the big three cloud providers, Oracle prefers to lease datacenter capacity from partners like Crusoe, rather than build them itself.

While the filing doesn’t mention OpenAI explicitly, Oracle’s success as an AI infrastructure provider is inextricably tied to the model dev and its cult-of-personality leader, Sam Altman.

In early 2025, Oracle joined OpenAI, SoftBank, and MGX to put its name on the so-called Stargate initiative, an ambitious project to pave the planet with half a trillion dollars worth of bit barns.

As we later learned, Oracle had signed up to provide $300 billion of capacity over five years as part of a long term agreement with OpenAI, which would also see the database provider manage the model dev’s flagship facility in Abilene, Texas. In addition to the OpenAI deal, Oracle claims to still have about $155 billion in remaining performance obligations from other customers.