Oracle Stock Edges Higher Today, Stabilizing After Worst Week Since the Dot-Com Bust on AI Debt Worries

Oracle shares ticked higher Tuesday, offering a modest reprieve after the software giant suffered its steepest weekly decline in roughly 25 years amid mounting investor anxiety over the scale of its debt-fueled bet on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Shares of the Austin, Texas-based company were trading at $148.37 as of 10:34 a.m. EDT, up 61 cents, or 0.41%, on the day. The slight gain follows a brutal stretch in which the stock fell 19% over five trading sessions last week, declining at least 2.6% on each individual day, marking Oracle’s worst weekly performance since a 20% plunge in August 2001, during the depths of the dot-com bust.

The selloff traces back to Oracle’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report, released June 10. The headline numbers were strong: Oracle beat Wall Street expectations on both earnings and revenue, with adjusted earnings per share of $2.03 against analyst estimates of $1.96, while revenue climbed 21% year-over-year to $19.18 billion, also topping the $19.10 billion consensus. Cloud revenue, the segment most closely tied to Oracle’s AI ambitions, surged 47% to nearly $10 billion for the quarter. Despite those beats, shares dropped roughly 10% in extended trading that evening after Oracle disclosed plans to raise an additional $20 billion through debt and equity financing on top of amounts already announced, bringing total planned fiscal 2027 financing to around $40 billion, following a fiscal 2026 in which the company had already raised $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity to fund its rapidly expanding data center footprint.

That spending has continued to weigh on sentiment in the weeks since. Oracle’s capital expenditures jumped 162% in fiscal 2026 to nearly $56 billion, while the company posted negative free cash flow of almost $24 billion for the year. By the end of May, Oracle’s total debt stood at roughly $130 billion, and the company has indicated that net cash outlays for capital expenditures in fiscal 2027 could reach approximately $70 billion, not including $20 billion to $25 billion in prepayments expected from customers. Oracle is racing to bring data center capacity online alongside cloud rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google, despite lacking the ability to sell as complete a technology stack as some of those larger competitors.

Much of Oracle’s long-term bull case rests on its enormous backlog of contracted future business, known as remaining performance obligations, which stood at roughly $638 billion as of the most recent quarter. Bank of America analysts, who recommend buying Oracle shares, have noted that more than half of that backlog comes from a single customer: OpenAI. That concentration has become a growing point of concern among some investors, particularly amid separate reports that OpenAI could push back its long-awaited initial public offering to 2027, a development that rattled sentiment across AI-linked software and infrastructure stocks more broadly last week. At one point during the selloff, Oracle’s total market capitalization actually fell below the size of its own backlog, an unusual dynamic underscoring just how skeptical some investors had become about translating that contracted demand into near-term profit.

Adding to the unease, Oracle disclosed in its annual report that its workforce shrank 13%, a reduction of roughly 21,000 employees, to about 141,000 workers in fiscal 2026, with the company recording $1.84 billion in associated restructuring costs tied in part to a broader push to integrate artificial intelligence tools into roles previously handled by sales, marketing and other staff. Vice Chairman Jeffrey Henley also drew attention after disclosing a $63.7 million sale of company shares on June 24, adding to investor unease about insider activity even as the company pursues additional equity issuance that could further dilute existing shareholders.

Leadership changes have also factored into the broader narrative around the stock. Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison was notably absent from the company’s most recent earnings call, leaving dual chief executives Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, along with recently hired finance chief Hilary Maxson, formerly of Schneider Electric, to field analyst questions. As Oracle shares have retreated, Ellison has slipped on rankings of the world’s wealthiest people, falling behind Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell.

Wall Street’s reaction to the turmoil has been mixed even as the stock attempts to stabilize. Citic Securities downgraded Oracle to “Add” from “Buy” with a $200 price target as the selloff deepened, while RBC raised its own price target to $190 but maintained a cautious “Sector Perform” rating, citing uncertainty over whether Oracle’s data center capacity is coming online quickly enough to match its massive backlog. BNP Paribas has flagged that fiscal 2027 capital expenditures could climb as high as $80 billion to $100 billion under the company’s Stargate data center initiative, a figure that has stoked further concern about free cash flow and debt sustainability. Evercore, which maintains a buy rating on the stock, struck a measured tone in a recent note to clients, writing that financing and the pace of equity issuance are likely to remain the central investor debate in the near term.

Not every recent headline has been negative. Real estate developer Related Digital and investment firm Blackstone announced they had secured funding for a $16 billion Oracle data center site in Michigan, a sign that institutional capital remains willing to back the company’s infrastructure ambitions even amid the broader stock turmoil. Jefferies has also maintained a Buy rating on the shares in recent days, reflecting a continued, if narrower, base of Wall Street support for the stock even after its dramatic decline.

Oracle stock remains down roughly 23% over the past year, well off its 52-week high of $345.72 and trading closer to its 52-week low of $134.57. Tuesday’s modest uptick offers little more than a pause in what has otherwise been one of the more turbulent stretches of the company’s recent history, with the central question hanging over the stock largely unchanged: whether Oracle’s massive, debt-fueled bet on artificial intelligence infrastructure will ultimately translate its enormous contracted backlog into sustainable profit, particularly given how heavily that backlog remains concentrated in a small number of large AI customers.