This is How Larry Elisson beat Musk for a short while although Oracle was struggling.' The deals among Oracle, Nvidia, and OpenAI have raised concerns about their circular and potentially risky nature. Oracle is reportedly spending tens of billions on Nvidia's advanced chips, Nvidia plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, and OpenAI uses Oracle's cloud infrastructure through Microsoft's Azure, creating a closed loop of financing and business. Some analysts warn this creates a reflexive loop or "dangerous bubble" where valuations may be inflated artificially by the circular flow of capital and resources, reminiscent of past booms that ended in sharp market corrections.
If this means that the fall of OpenAI will cause Oracle and Nvidia to crash and downsize, bubbles aren't completely bad.
You can't discount the impact this will have on global stock markets and what that may do to both individuals and, more importantly, pension funds, as a large swath of people are retiring
Damage is unavoidable, we can only hope that it happens to someone deserving. Innocent individuals and pension funds still have time to retreat; if they don't it will be their fault.
Yes but this is by design. Wealthy people want bubbles, when they pop, you can gobble up all the value at all time lows. Then you hold until you don't feel like it anymore as the market goes back to growing. You see this as how private equity has bought up real estate across the USA to turn into rentals after 2008, for example.
> If this means that the fall of OpenAI will cause Oracle and Nvidia to crash and downsize
Only if those are the only actual real customers. It's not. The pie is a lot bigger. And with the current hype some other AI company will just take over and the bubble will continue.
Is it fair to say OpenAI is in a sense “washing” the money passing between Nvidia and Oracle? And instead of taking a cut in the traditional money laundering they are enjoying massive valuation gains?
When the fed investigates this does it matter if one of the 3 companies is not a publicly traded company?
I guess you could see it like that but I don’t think it’s “wash trading” in the sense that they’re coordinating it. I don’t really know what the fed would investigate here.
What you're missing is that real value can be created in these exchanges - Nvidia really makes chips for example.
The issue is that it's an industry of investment which exists solely to power more investment in AI - the entire chain is still assuming that someone will eventually pay for this.
At the end of the day all that money leaks out to employees and suppliers...but no one those people transact with may have any interest in buying what was produced.
Leaks out? Don’t you mean “trickles down”?
That's only really value if the chips are useful and if there are people buying the chips for something they want to do with them.
It's entirely based on the perception that LLM training & inference is here to stay at ever growing scales when the shortcomings of Artificial Dreaming are increasingly scrutinized. Not all businesses want to end up paying refunds to their clients like Deloitte [1] because the LLM hallucinated crap into their reports (and they failed to correct it).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi...
Deloitte just bought like 400k Claude enterprise licenses. Bad example.
> It's entirely based on the perception that LLM training & inference is here to stay at ever growing scales when the shortcomings of Artificial Dreaming are increasingly scrutinized. Not all businesses want to end up paying refunds to their clients like Deloitte [1] because the LLM hallucinated crap into their reports (and they failed to correct it).
This assumes Deloitte didn't make more $$$ from the deal by "outsourcing" it to AI than not. It was a partial refund.
You haven’t brought in the side costs into your analysis
> You haven’t brought in the side costs into your analysis
And you haven't considered that Deloitte might get this money some other way anyway. It's been budgeted and needs to be spent by the government department for this financial year. They'll find another project to hand out.
lol you and I are not talking about the same stuff mate
Oracle most certainly is not struggling. Even putting aside the NVidia deal, their cloud business is thriving.
They give you 4 nodes with 1 vcpu and 6GB RAM each for free forever by the way. Most other stuff has a free tier too.
I used it to learn terraform and have a kubernetes cluster running.
I know it's always trendy to bash oracle and simp for AWS, but it is THE best option for learning and hobbyists.
On a sofware salary, would rather pay the 20 something to a provider like hetzner instead of giving my personal info to oracle
That's very cool. I was going to get a hetzner for some hobby projects.
Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism? For some reason, I'd be more cautious about putting my card into Oracle's offering than anyone else.
> Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism?
No!
There are actually two free tiers.
The limited free tier you get without adding a CC and then this advanced "always free" tier I am using, where you have to use and verify a CC and have to pay big bucks if you mess up.
limited free tier: 300$ to be spent in 30 days
advanced always free tier: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
So it's free... Until is not. My take on this would be that if Oracle makes any change to that "free" tier and you do not take proper action you might be automatically charged hefty amounts from your credit card. No, thanks. It's way way safer to spend few bucks a month in other VPS options than get a big surprise on your credit card.
Privacy.com has always been a working general solution to this, for me. Disposable CC aliases with spending caps.
Messing up with Oracle is a bit different from messing up with Google. I'll go with Hetzner which I love anyway. :)
You can also get all of that in a single node, which makes for a fairly beefy build server :)
Uh, you can get that level of compute locally easy peasy.
Learning terraform isn't hard, it's what you stitch together with terraform that is hard.
I think the point here is that free beats easy peasy, especially when learning a new skill, where your easy peasy isn't their easy peasy. And getting something up and running on Oracle Cloud with Terraform is nowhere near easy peasy for someone who never did anything with Terraform ;)
'Back in my day' we learned with VMs for free! The computer you have works without internet, for instance
> while although Oracle was struggling
In terms of actual earnings not sure Tesla is doing better.
It's worth noting Elisson is 2 years older than Trump.
What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?
Worst case, he got to be #1 for a bit for a few dozen billion, best case he's hoping AGI will extend his life before he croaks.
Give it all to the IDF.
Doubt he believes that. Getting AGI (whatever that actually means) means we are still far away from reversing ageing.
Even smart people belive a lot of untrue things, and his domain of knowledge isn't likely to include much more biology than my GCSE grade C and a handfull of brilliant.org micro-lessons; it's quite possible, though I would not put specific odds on it, that he's seen e.g. the sudden change in the rate of progress in protein folding, where before it was ~ one PhD thesis per protein and then suddenly AlphaFold did all of them, and extrapolated from that to everything else like an over-enthusiastic PopSci reporter.
(Interestingly, some of the world's dictators do seem to have an interest in the current state of the art in prolonging life. For example Xi and Putin chatted about organ replacement https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr70rvrd41ko)
Ah yes, my favourite philosophical dilemma, The Organs of Theseus, and whether or not a sufficiently organ-replaced person is absolved of their previous actions by virtue of not necessarily being the same person.
As a more serious point related to this though, I was under the impression that organ replacement didn't address issues with telomere length?
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What does Ellisons personal wealth have to do with this? The concern is that the circular pattern of shifting money between these companies is artificially inflating the stock market to heights that will crash very very badly when this bubble finally pops.
The market is due a correction irrespective of bubble mania.
The implied equity risky premium is getting pretty low - a sign of greed.
> What's he going to do with all that money, and what does he care for the risk it's bad or shady?
The thing that unites Ellison, Trump, Musk, Thiel and a fair few of the other politically active billionaires is the obsession with "legacy" - they want to leave their mark in the history books, figures which will likely be remembered and taught in schools in thousands of years similar to Roman emperors.
Musk is the most obvious with his obsession of settling (and eventually dying) on Mars, Trump is dreaming of getting a Nobel Peace Prize (if only to not let Obama be the only US President who got one), and the rest is hunting for the "invented AGI" crown.
Obama was the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, after Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919)—both of whom received the award during their terms—and Jimmy Carter (2002), who received the award 21 years after leaving office. - wikipedia
Thanks for the correction!