34
Oracle outlines all the ways it could lose the farm it bet on AI AI (www.theregister.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@piefed.social
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Risk factors galore

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I was confused by the article. I thought oracle was an AI company like openAI or anthropic. But the article said they lease data centers? Like from other companies or to other companies? Reading comprehension isn't high at the moment, being end of shift of an exhausting night, but can someone ELI5 what exactly it is that they do?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    Primarily, they make the Oracle database which they license at extortionate rates to businesses for building literally anything that requires a database. It's arguably the industry standard for relational databases, although it has lost market share over recent decades to open source relational databases like MySQL and Postgres and also, since the 2010s, to the NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB etc. Still, Oracle is a titan, and it's likely that you interact half a dozen times a day with an Oracle database in various businesses and companies without knowing it.

    Like all the other big tech companies though, Oracle has been pouring cash into the AI bubble in the form of contracts to build datacentres. They've taken on so much debt to fund their FOMO that they are in real danger of bankrupting themselves. That's where we are today. Compare also to how Microsoft has destroyed any remaining good-will for Windows, and Google has mutilated its golden goose: search. The tech industry players in 5 years time might look quite different to the ones we've had for the last 25.

    Fingers crossed.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    Awesome, thank you. That clears up a lot, as I've been seeing their name along with the others a lot lately and I had initially thought they were a cloud service when I first heard of em ~4 years ago or so?

    Edit: as in cloud originally, that moved into AI.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent