Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.
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If the banks don’t see the value in it, it’s only a matter of time
It’s always been just a matter of time
Once that glorified autocomplete turns sentient you’ll look like quite the fewel.
AI, at this point, seems to have been the single largest scam and money laundering scheme in history.
So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!
I believe the war industry will take it over for the next turn.
At least the banks are figuring out what we knew long ago.
You’d think they learned from the dotcom bubble and the hundred other times they gambled and lost. I guess it doesn’t matter when you just get paid back with taxpayer money.
I think this is two stories being mixed a bit here?
A bit over one month old, the lending issues: https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-30000-jobs-to-fund-ai-data-center-expansion-as-us-banks-retreat.html
Now, confirmation of the cuts that were suspected since last year from Bloomberg: https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-cuts-data-center-costs-rise-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-03-05/
I’m not saying there is not a link between the events, but somehow the posted article does a weird rehash mixed with news, and is not even dated, and I don’t like that, so I’m sharing the individual news pieces as separate links for other’s benefit.
I see you and raise you a class action for reckless AI spending: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/oracle-corporation-orcl-class-action-lawsuit-seeks-recovery-for-investors-april-6-2026-deadline-contact-kessler-topaz-meltzer-check-llp-890e8c24
Thanks for doing the research
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I was listening to a finance YT vid last night and the dude said if it wasn’t for the enormous AI spend, the US would be deep in a technical recession now.
obviously the fault of immigrants and those on food stamps though /s
We are in a deep recession?
The enormous AI spend isn’t going to me, or you, or anyone I ever met.
True, but line isn’t going down yet.
Because none of the checks they’ve kited have come due
Those damn immigrants taking up all of the best landscaping, slaughterhouse, roof tarring, and crop picking jobs.
Ironically the only jobs that Anthropic and OpenAI claim AI won’t take. All those newly minted AI billionaires and nobody to maintain their golf courses… How sad is that?
What good is being super wealthy if you can’t feel superior to other people?
They fired people for AI, now they fire them without AI. Please tell me how they plan on sustaining an economy where only the 1% has discretionary income?
They don’t need an economy. They need obedient workers
Control instead of trust, a problem as old as time. Trust would lead to prosperity, control, if not absolute, will always eventually fail - and it’s never absolute.
Obedient unemployed
First they need to destroy your income, then they can make you do whatever they want
But Oracle was building those data centers for OpenAI. OpenAI is going to be used by the Pentagon. Bailing Oracle out is now a matter of National Security!! If this has to come off of the taxes paid by the people they just laid off, that’s unfortunate but… have I mentioned National Security?
No, this week it’s the children.
Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.
Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.
Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.
And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.
I was laid off in 2019 by a large west coast tech giant as part of a mass layoff. We had the option of trying to find a new internal job but every job posting involved AI (seven years ago!) and nobody that I knew even got a reply from any application. Now I’m a school bus driver and 100X happier even though I make like 1/5 of what I used to make. The plot twist is that AI is probably going to replace school bus drivers sooner or later, flattened children be damned.
They could, but you’ll likely be the last one to go. Those kids will likely kill each other without supervision, and the third time they have to drive little Jimmy to school because the bus AI didn’t wait 30 seconds, they’ll be so far up the administration’s ass. They’ll know what they had for breakfast.
my older bro as laid off as part of the first wave in '23 heard thier company got bought out and he hasnt found any job yet, he might be doing “investment or stocks though”.
ugh. I hate driving.
Easy win for companies that didn’t buy into the hype. I’m the only dedicated software dev at my company, so there was no middle manager to foolishly think a chat bot could do my job. We are a small company that can compete with big players, and those big players appear to be floundering. Now, we are expanding.
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This is worse than 2008 and I remember back then I was let go and the other guy was not and we sorta debated which would be worse off. This is way worse though. I would say at least twice as bad at this point. Funny thing was no one realized the trouble we were in in 2008 it was really like 2010 by the time it was really felt. On hindsite they are going to be talking about the collapse in 2025.
I’m not an economist, so I don’t know shit about fuck (though most economists don’t either tbf), but some people are comparing this to the railway bubble. Shit’s (potentially) so bad that they don’t even have a comparison from within our lifetimes to point to.
we already seeing the effects of fresh graduates from college, and those that are still in. i wonder if any more reports of universities having low enrollments is going to be too big to ignore.
I cannot wait for this bubble to finally burst.
It’s gonna suck for the working class WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than the people who will lose their fortunes as a result of the bubble popping
sorry
it always does
Michael Saylor, one of the biggest owners of one of the other “doesnt actually do anything” bubbles - Bitcoin - is a great example. He made a fortune during the dot com bubble.
With that said, if I have to eat hard tack and canned beans and use leftover charcoal from the park BBQ grills instead of toothpaste in order to never have another AI bullshit feature shoehorned into my existence, it might be worth it
Yes, I am well aware that we live under capitalism.
The big bubble. May it pop before we do.
this may be one of the early signs of a burst(besides the economy falling due to that one war i think?)
I saw this and sound “holy shit” aloud. If this sketchy source is legit, this is probably pretty big. The stock market has been wobbly the last few days.
True.
The stock market (for tech companies) has also been falling before the war.
You should be able to sue companies for gambling away their employees’ lives like that.
You as in who, the shareholders that indirectly voted for it?
Fuck the shareholders.
Who is doing the lawsuit, some unrelated third party, the employees?
The people that were laid off.
Investors are already suing Oracle right now btw, of course the legal system wouldn’t have let them down.
Ah I see, that would be an interesting law. Maybe it will happen one day, and we will take it for granted like we do 8 hour work days.
It’s not unheard of, in certain cases in certain more civilised states it does happen.
The state should be able to sue as layoffs put strain on the social system.
Didn’t see THAT coming, huh “oracle”?
here comes the oh so predictable crash.
I hope oracle tanks and takes Ellison with it
This particular source seems sketchy, but the broader context supports the core of this story.
There was a report in January from TD Cowen that Oracle needed to free up cash as banks tightened up lending for data center deals, and that certain projects were on hold and in jeopardy of being canceled. That same report projected that Oracle might lay off 20,000 to 30,000 workers.
Then, just this last Friday, Bloomber reported that Oracle and OpenAI canceled their plans to expand their flagship data center in Texas as part of their $500 billion “Stargate” initiative. Here’s the Reuters article describing it at a high level, because the original report is paywalled.
So everyone is looking back at that January report and seeing the recent data center news as confirmation that Oracle wants to free up cash by laying off staff.
What does Oracle even do?
Charge people who accidentally used their Java SDK.
Create a db that sucks so bad you have to hire them to maintain it.
Boy you’re in for a ride.
Palantir runs on Oracle Cloud.
Oracle finances Paramount buying out Warner Bros.
Other shady shit Oracle does: https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/the-merger-that-needed-a-war
Basically think Oracle is a competent League of Evil that can hide from the media spotlight.
They hide from the media spotlight by increasingly being the media spotlight.
Something can’t hit you without showing itself before. Oracle takes it to the next level and tells you they’re coming before they destroy you. Vampires need to be invited.
They sell software that sits so deep in people’s stack that replacing it takes tons of effort. Companies calculate that it’s cheaper to keep paying Oracle than to rewrite crucial services.
Specifically, they have had a popular expensive DBMS for last 30ish years.
Which even they saw as a diminishing opportunity, so they bought Sun so they also have Solaris and Java and a bunch of other miscellaneous crap.
They get non trivial amounts of money by punishing anyone with a business relationship with them with audits and superfluous invoices.
Story time, a product at my company used to provide a Java webstart application from a web GUI. We did not use any oracle software including any of their Java editions so we paid it no mind (though I hated the applet demanding Java, but at least it wasn’t active x).
Anyway several of our customers said we needed to purge it, because oracle detected JSPs served by our software, and their audit said that if JSPs were served but no Java runtimes detected, obviously the company must be “hiding” the JREs and invoiced the company for every employee to have their paid Java runtimes. Happened to multiple of our clients.
So that’s what drive us to finally purge Java and embrace modern html capabilities, and a way that Oracle makes money and also any no one who knows anything wants to willingly end up with an Oracle business relationship.
It took three years but we’ve almost rooted it all out.
There’s still one ancient product that will (theoretically) decommission in mid 2028. It makes enough money to cover the Oracle licensing but isn’t worth reworking to migrate.
Knowing how decom goes, I’m sure it’ll still be running in 2035 with that one last client who “can’t move to the newer, better, easier project because… Reasons (I don’t wanna)”
Some people say Oracle doesn’t have clients. They have hostages.
Sues their customers
Makes Larry Edison rich
I’ve been a software engineer for over 20 years now and tbh I couldn’t tell you even if my life depended on it. I know it’s a shit tier hosting service that people use because they offer 5$ worth virtual server for free with a valid credit card but that’s about it.
It’s one of those ancient paper shuffling IT companies that is 95% sale/middle mamager leeches, 5% wizard engineers carrying everything on their shoulders.
Sounds a lot like IBM.
At least IBM used to be cool and gave us things like SQL, DRAM and Thinkpads. Other than Java kits I couldn’t name a single useful initiative from Oracle. They just take existing inventions and shuffle enterprise papers.
Oracle didn’t even create Java, Sun Microsystems did and Oracle gobbled them up. The only thing Oracle has actually created is a shitty old database system and legions of lawyers.
I don’t know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.
IBM gave us the PC standard! That’s by far their biggest contribution to the IT world, we’re still harvesting the belefits today.
Look at the ARM ecosystem of “every-PCB-is-its-own-kind”.
Used to be cool…you might want to look a little bit further into IBMs past, specifically what they were doing during WW2…
The tech is still cool. Doesn’t mean IBM didn’t deserve to be dissolved and it’s entire staff shoved into a wood chipper post war for aiding and abetting genocide. Kinda like the V1s and V2s, fun fact my great grandfather worked on those and Stukas, shame the Navy posted him in fucking Florida.
All is justified if it gave us Thinkpad 🙂↕️
Yes and like IBM they are in the business of getting out of business, and business is good!
Both IBM and Oracle I haven’t really worked with because they’re heavily used by massive companies. We had an Oracle database when I was in banking that was because we were self hosting a loan accounting system. IBM does backend data processing stuff for massive companies like American Express and Bank of America. All of the smaller shops I’ve worked in have built things on Microsoft’s stack.
Is this hyperbole? I really doubt someone can be a SWE for even 2 years and not know what oracle does…
Nope, I’m not an american and oracle is really not that well known outside of american corporate tech.
Mysql and Java were very big in Europe but as developer you don’t really interact with Oracle at all and even then everyone’s using openjdk since early 2010s so really if you’re not working in american enterprise you never even going to encounter Oracle’s name let alone interact with them.
My only interaction was calling their support trying to explain what a debit card is because Oracle is so brokenly american that they don’t understand the difference between debit and credit.
I work with banks, insurance companies, telecoms, manufacturers and ocassionally retailers in Europe, they all use Oracle for well over half of their applications.
They used to sell a pretty good (if complex) database system. However it hasn’t been popular for many years. I assume they still have big customers who are locked in.
These days they’re just another amorphous “cloud service provider”, and not a good one either.
In IT the golden rule is regardless of technical merit, you do not want a business relationship with Oracle under any circumstances.
They will use that foot in the door to make your life hell with audits and invoicing crap you never bought.
I work with a client using an Oracle DB. You have to do multiple request to even do something basic as pagination 😂.
They improved it over the years, but given the choice, I’d advice for anything else than Oracle. I’d even prefer MS Sql, which, given I’m pretty anti-MS, is a miracle.
They are doing something wrong. Say what you want about their commercial strategy, the product itself is pretty good. It can definitely do pagination, and I hope they are not doing skip and limit.
Yeah, you can do pagination, but you need two request : one to select everything, the second to only return the results between id x and id y. Needless to say, the performances are far from ideal.
But in recent version you do skip and take x, which is far easier to write. But my codebase date back to the 2000’s, and it uses the old ways.
As an example, an SQL request to filter on an handful of parameters, and paginate, easily amount to 40-50 lines of SQL. And that’s the easy ones, because some request uses multiple view, in which case I wouldn’t be surprised to find a request doing more than 100 lines of SQL, maybe without even factoring the view in.
That’s some funky code, pagination is much easier than that, unless there’s something else going on.
Probably, but I won’t touch that shit unless I have no way doing otherwise.
Edit : As an example, I got an “add or update” stored procedure that start line 5, and ends line… 226.
It hasn’t been popular? I guess you mean “cool” or “trendy” but well more than half of enterprise applications work on oracle, closer to 75% in fact.
Yes, plenty of companies are exiting oracle but it will still dominate for at least a decade. Sometimes there’s just no good equivalent, and no, Postgres cannot compare even tho it’s a great DB for many use cases.
Years ago, they were the go to solution for databases. No CIO would ever be fired for picking Oracle over competitors regardless the pain that would follow, same as having Windows as the OS on all employees computers.
If there’s an issue with the world’s most popular solutxon: “Shits happens, we all know”, if there’s an issue with that alternative solution: “You see what bappens with your toy-thing? Let’s be professional and use a professional solution!”.
Years have passed, the alternative slowly made a name for themselves, but OracleDB didn’t evolve much because of inertia and the high maintenance that locks existing customers.
So now they’re going all-in on data centres for AI, that means to me the end is near.
Destroy popular and useful companies.
DATACENTERs apparently, especially for AI.
“You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”
They sponsor some really neat sailboats
