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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What does Oracle even do?
Destroy popular and useful companies.
DATACENTERs apparently, especially for AI.
Charge people who accidentally used their Java SDK.
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.
Yes and like IBM they are in the business of getting out of business, and business is good!
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.
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”.
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.
Used to be cool…you might want to look a little bit further into IBMs past, specifically what they were doing during WW2…
All is justified if it gave us Thinkpad 🙂↕️
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
In IT the golden rule is regardless of technical media, 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.
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.
Some people say Oracle doesn’t have clients. They have hostages.
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)”
Create a db that sucks so bad you have to hire them to maintain it.
Makes Larry Edison rich
Sues their customers
“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.”
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.
They sponsor some really neat sailboats
The bubble popping seems inevitable at this point. Before the Giants were funding this by their core business plus loans backed by their core business. Now they’ve stretched their credit so much that no one’s giving them loans anymore and instead of cutting back on the building spree they’re making cuts to their core business.
They’re betting that their customers are so locked in that they won’t leave despite degradation in service. How deep oracle, AWS, googles hooks are in people remain to be seen, people seem to tolerate a lot of enshitification, but there’s gotta be a tipping point. Once they reach that and the core business crashes all the rest of the dominos will fall.
Once these companies have to start charging what it really costs to maintain and run these huge models. The number of use cases will shrivel.
Models are becoming more optimized. I’ve recently tried LFM2.5, small version, and it’s ridiculously close in usefulness to Qwen3.5, for example. Or RNJ-1.
To maintain, meaning actualized datasets - well, sort of expensive, but they were assembling those as a side effect of their main businesses.
So this is not what’ll kill them. Their size will. These are very big companies with lots of internal corruption and inefficiency pulling them down. And a few new AI companies, which, I think, are going to survive, they are centered around specific products, some will die, but I’d expect LiquidAI or Anthropic or such to still be around some time after the crash.
The crash might coincide with a bubble burst, but notice how this family of technologies really is delivering results. Instead of a bunch of specialized applications people are asking LLMs and getting often good enough answers. LLM agents can retrieve data from web services, perform operations, assist in using tools.
You shouldn’t look at the big ones in the cloud, rather at what value local LLMs give you for energy spent. Right now it’s not that good, but approaching good honestly. I don’t feel like they’ve stopped becoming better. Human time is still more expensive. The tools are there, and are being improved, and the humans are slowly gaining experience in using them, and that makes them more efficient in various tasks.
It’s for all kinds of reference and knowledge tools what Google was for search.
And there’s one just amazing thing about these models - they are self-contained, even if some can use tools to access external sources. Our corporate overlords have been building a dependent networked world for 20 years, simply to break it by popularizing a technology that almost neuters that. They were thinking, probably, that they were reaping the crops of the web for themselves, instead they taught everyone that you don’t have to eat at the diner, you can take the food home.
Only people who know very little about a field feel like AI “is good enough” for that field. Experts in a field will universally say that AI is shit in their field.
LLMs are the extreme example of “the dumb man’s idea of a smart man.” It sounds like it knows what it’s talking about so people ignorant on the subject don’t know it’s full of shit.
The problem is that there is a lot if these people that thinks LLMs are good enough, and many of them are in decisional positions, so we’re getting raked no matter what.
A lot of fields don’t require doctorate levels of expertise to render effective business services. I’ve seen first hand companies replace thousands of employees and shutter divisions because their AI counterpart has been doing the job quantitatively equally, and faster. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, in most cases, as they say.
Lemmy is filled to the brim with llm haters but you’re not only a minority, you’re probably also closing doors on the future trajectory of tech in business.
perhaps but one example, Commonwealth Bank (largest Australian Bank and in the top 10 worldwide AFAIK) in Australia said they were dismissing 1000’s of staff because of AI, turned out they were just offshoring. The latter is seen positively apparently, the former not so much.
Lemmy is filled to the brim with llm haters but you’re not only a minority, you’re probably also closing doors on the future trajectory of tech in business.
“Think of the shareholder value of firing all these people!”
Also, I call bullshit. I’ve seen many cases of companies replacing their staff with AI, then a month later desperately trying to hire staff again because the AI is good at "looking like* it can do the job but once in use turns out it’s complete shit.
“Think of the shareholder value of firing all these people!”
This is of course problematic, but not directly the fault of the technology itself. The entire system is problematic, but that’s a digression from the effectiveness of the tech doing the job.
And the instances I’m talking about were running the ai stack and employee teams in parallel for nearly a year. The replacement wasn’t a “yeah let’s try this… whoops that didn’t work”. It was a tried and tested approach, and the employees made redundant (in the capability sense, not the firing sense, which followed afterwards).
And I give it less then a year before the “oh shit, we really should have human’s overseeing this” hits
Bad craftsman blames his tools is what I’d answer to this.
I agree anyone using an LLM is a bad craftsman, because they’re using a hammer to drive in a screw.
All LLMs are using a tool for the wrong task then, in your opinion? So in the composite object of “LLM” what is the tool and what is the task?
So in the composite object of “LLM” what is the tool and what is the task?
The tool is “Language Learning Model” and the task is “Learn language and mimic human speech.”
The task is not “Provide accurate information” or “write code” or “provide legal advice” or “Diagnose these symptoms” or “provide customer service” or “manage a database”.
I agree with you and I consider it similar to the ‘hollywood effect’: Ask any expert to review typical depictions of their expertise in film and tv and they will mostly groan at the inaccuracies that most people won’t catch.
Problem is that if you compare the works that do it ‘right’ to the ones that do it ‘wrong’, there’s no correlation between doing it right and being more popular, the horribly wrong depictions get plenty of ratings regardless.
Now one might reasonably argue ‘sure, but that’s purely fiction anyway, if it had real consequences, that would actually matter’, except it constantly happens in real world situations.
My work colleague picked up his car from some mechanic chain after having it ‘fixed’ and took us to lunch. There was just this awful squeal as he started the car and I said why is it making that noise after just getting fixed and the guy said “Oh, the staff told me that cars just sound like that after a repair until the parts break in” and that bullshit worked to get him to pay and walk out the door. I ask if I can take a quick look under his hood and there was a flashlight wedged against a belt. He just laughed it off and said “hey, free flashlight, thanks for figuring that out” and a few months later he had mentioned going back to the exact same place for something else.
A few days ago I went to a hardware store and their site said they had it, but under location it said “see associate”. The first one checked his device and didn’t understand what the deal was so he said “Oh, go over there and ask John, he knows all this stuff”. Ok, so I walk over to John, who takes one glance and confidently says “oh yeah, that stuff is in a cage in the back row locked up, just go up to the cage and press the button to get someone to get it”. I think “ok, good, a guy who really knows his stuff and the other staff recognize him for it”. I roll up to the cage and look in and realize “uh oh, this is not the type of stuff I’m looking for, he made a pretty amateur mistake”, but I push the button anyway. I show my phone to the guy who comes up and said that “John” said it would be here but I couldn’t see it, and at the mention of “John” the guy clearly rolled his eyes and it was abundantly clear that John’s “expertise” was a repeated annoyance for the guy. The actual answer is they kept that stuff in back and the employees all are supposed to see the notation in their devices telling them this, but none of them seem to figure it out and John just keeps sending people to his department instead.
This has also come out in use of AI. I offered that my group could crank out a quick tool to do something that could be a problem, and one of the people said “in this new era, we don’t need you for this quick tool, I just asked Claude and it made me this application”. So I tested it and reported that ‘a’, it didn’t actually work, it produced stuff that looked right, but the actual tool wouldn’t accept it because it didn’t se the right syntax, and ‘b’, if t did work, it faked authentication and had a huge vulnerability. He just laughed it off and said ‘guess LLMs sometimes aren’t perfect yet’, no consequences for what could have been a disastrous tool, no severe change in stance on using LLMs, and I am pretty sure the audience probably found the response about it not working to be annoyingly buzzkill and were rooting for the LLM to do all the work instead. People who need your expertise are desparate to not need your expertise anymore and are willing to believe anything to enable that, and are willing to accept a lot of badness just to not be dependent on you.
AI produce what is seen as plausible narrative, and plausible narrative can win even when the facts are against it. To be very charitable, a quick “usually” correct answer is indeed frequently “good enough” for a lot of purposes, and LLM’s speed at generating output can’t be beat.
I like local LLMs as much as the next person but the issue is that doesn’t scale the way companies need it to.
As a personal assistant? Sure, I agree. They’re useful at times. But as soon as you need multiple to run simultaneously you’re gonna hit resource issues.
What Oracle and others were banking on is that you have engineers and others running a lot of agents in parallel composing different things together. Or having one input that multiple serverside agents take and execute numerous tasks on. That’s something you can’t run on an individual machine right now. And with the way they currently work I don’t envision they will anytime soon.
Even if local models are good, the big companies are making local computing more expensive than cloud tokens by colluding with ram and storage makers to restrict supply.
More expensive, but still autonomous which is very precious.
Perfect time for some foreign company to eat Oracles lunch.
that is why they are trying to peddle this to governments in EU, USA so heavily, they know they will take on AI at face value, instead of testing the efficacy of using AI.
Great timing then, just as the states becomes a global pariah making every one else on earth have to reevaluate any business done with american based firms. Nations are worried about massive instability and war, no one has the appetite to gamble big on unproven tech dreams.
Looks like the survivors are gonna survive.
Note that the article is from the beginning of February.
Fuckin explains a lot of the last month’s issues
Why did it take so long
Real jobs or AI jobs.
It’s Oracle: It’s not like they deliver value either way.
That’s a good point to remember when future job numbers are shared.
Real Temporary Jobs building and managing the AI Datacenters.
Will this help lower ram prices?
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.
This behavior increases enjoyment and utility of the Internet. Thank you!
Thanks for doing the research
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
I called it a year or two ahead of time. Oracle will get bought by the federal government. Larry already has the fix in.
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.
I hope oracle tanks and takes Ellison with it
AI, at this point, seems to have been the single largest scam and money laundering scheme in history.
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.
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.
Yes, clearly it is the human staff that needs to be cut from the budget here. Fucking imbeciles.
This looks desperate. They already sold $300B worth of data center capacity to OpenAI and this move will save them up to $10B.
They’re supposedly depreciating their GPUs over 7 years. Apparently these data center GPUs are only used for about 3, as the generational improvements in efficiency almost dictate you replace them + the first stragglers start failing around that mark anyway
They could actually be proper fucked financially if they’re cooking their books like that to seem more profitable than they are.
Also, I doubt a GPU that’s been on blast 24/7 for the last couple of years will be worth much at auction. Might as well bury them in the same landfill as the data center.
These GPUs are useless outside of data centers anyway. Take the current gen, the B200. No DirectX or Vulkan support or even OpenGL I believe. Power usage about a kilowatt. SXM rather than PCI-E so it’s not like you can run it on a desktop motherboard.
They’re literally e-waste after a few years. And they’re 40-50k per GPU, but often bought as a full system with 8 GPUs in it, for a couple hundred thousand.
YEEEEESSSSSS~
