“If people start getting worried about Oracle’s ability to pay,” Shalett told Fortune, “that’s gonna be an early indication to us that people are getting nervous.”
“This transparency on the timing and the amount of Oracle supply is supportive for the broader market,” the analysts wrote, given how nervous credit markets and analysts like Shalett had been through the back half of 2025. This announcement “chips away at hyperscaler supply risks” by providing absolute certainty on both the timing and magnitude of Oracle’s market participation, the analysts wrote. The equity market didn’t exactly agree.
BofA suggested that this set a constructive precedent for the sector. Future bond deals from other tech giants are now likely to act as positive market catalysts rather than disrupters. For a new deal to act as a negative catalyst now, the supply would need to be significantly larger than these aggressive expectations, a scenario analysts view as challenging, given that the market has already priced in up to $300 billion of hyperscaler supply.
There’s just one problem with this thesis: what happened to Oracle stock later on Monday—and so far on Tuesday. The reason why says a lot about the importance of corporate communications at this juncture in the AI hyperscaler trade.
The positive vibes from Oracle’s Sunday press release were erased—and more—by a lone tweet from the company.
So far, that strategy has proved difficult to turn into pure growth.
Second—and more troubling for investors—Oracle is increasingly exposed to a single and highly opaque customer. A significant share of those data centers are being built for OpenAI, a private company with over $1 trillion in obligations and only about $20 billion in revenue. Investors have begun questioning how OpenAI can scale its revenue without continual, massive funding rounds, and because the company is private, markets have none of the transparency they would normally demand from an entity this systemically important.
However, the risks matter more for companies that have already taken on leverage to meet OpenAI-driven demand. Oracle has nearly $250 billion in long-term leasing commitments tied to data centers with life spans of 15 to 20 years, many of which it expects to sublease on shorter time horizons. If demand falters, or capital tightens, Oracle could be left holding the debt long before the cash arrives.
