BREAKINGVIEWS-Larry Ellison’s AI war tactics will backfire

(The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.) By Jennifer Saba NEW YORK, Dec 18 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Larry Ellison is channeling an ancient treatise for an ultra-modern battle. The billionaire devotee of Chinese military general Sun Tzu will know “The Art of War” advice to convey weakness when strong and strength when weak. For artificial intelligence, it’s a question of which applies to his software goliath Oracle (ORCL.N) . Ellison often projects bravado, whether flying fighter jets or leading hostile takeovers. At 81, he remains as aggressive as ever. The tech mogul put up money to fund his son David’s pursuit of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD.O) , while Oracle was a leading player in a group that in September agreed to take a 50% stake in the American unit of short-video app TikTok. Pivoting into AI represents another audacious move. Ellison’s plan is to capitalize on the same machine-learning frenzy benefiting Microsoft (MSFT.O) , Alphabet (GOOGL.O) and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) , which dominate the cloud-computing market. Oracle has started building data centers at breakneck pace and great cost. The company’s capital expenditure is expected to rise nearly 70% from a year earlier, to $35 billion, for the year ending May 2026, according to estimates gathered on Visible Alpha, or more than half its anticipated revenue. By comparison, Microsoft’s proportion will be around 30%. It’s also hard to value Oracle’s five-year, $300 billion deal with OpenAI when the ChatGPT maker was only on track for $20 billion in 2025 revenue and set to keep burning cash for years. Early exuberance for the contract wore off. A 35% surge in Oracle’s stock price in September completely vanished two months later, as its $90 billion of debt – the fourth largest sum among S&P 500 Index constituents, according to LSEG – and doubts about its big customer started seeping in. The cost to protect against an Oracle default using derivatives tripled between late July and early December, reaching almost 140 basis points. S&P Global reckons OpenAI would account for more than a third of Oracle’s top line in 2028, if it all comes to fruition. Moreover, the company’s credit rating already hovers a few notches above junk status and S&P put it on a negative outlook in September. Oracle’s Stargate project to house AI computing power will add to the burden, with Morgan Stanley analysts projecting that net debt, adjusted for leases, will roughly triple to some $300 billion by May 2028. Tenacity often pays off for Ellison, but his tactics this time look shaky. Shareholders and creditors are likely to become increasingly jittery about the dangerous arms race. Oracle’s valuation multiple, at about 25 times forward earnings in December, was higher than that of many large peers. Once some financial realities set in, the company will be among the first to pare capex, in the process revealing that Oracle’s AI flex was from weakness. Follow Jennifer Saba on Bluesky and LinkedIn. This is a Reuters Breakingviews prediction for 2026. Oracle already carries one of the biggest debt loads (Editing by Jeffrey Goldfarb; Production by Oliver Taslic)