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S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

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Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#31
Market signals on an impending AI bust are broader than just Oracle’s woes.

For example, Amazon just had a challenging bond offering where the market is clearly starting to seriously question the ROI on all this money being pumped into AI buildout. That does not bode well at all for AI-only companies without broader cash flow from other businesses. And when the cash dries up this whole thing comes crashing down like a house of cards.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#32

There is AI data center overcapacity already. The KOSPI crashed last week, and it's a leading indicator for the cyclical hardware industry. It already had been that indicator in the 2000 bubble. I don't know what possessed Ellison to ruin a functioning company, but it will be interesting if he gets a margin call for ORCL's other debt exposures, which are Ellison's massive loans against his ORCL stock.

Well it seems like he bought the “AGI is 2 years away” line. As did… pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#33
post #21

Is it me or do none of the AI companies have a "moat" in the Ben Grahmm sense. I use their services, but I frankly don't care who provides it. I'll chase the chepest/best and have no issue switching from one to another. The only moat I can see is Microsoft providing its services to companies in its Azure system. Nervous IT departments probably like that it's not leaving their control if Bob in the SAP team spins up s…

Nvidia has a moat. Hardware is hard. No one really competes with them for general compute

I thought that Nvidia's moat was more in CUDA? Hardware is hard but we've already seen other companies like Google design neural processors with compute efficiency close to Nvidia.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#34

Is it me or do none of the AI companies have a "moat" in the Ben Grahmm sense. I use their services, but I frankly don't care who provides it. I'll chase the chepest/best and have no issue switching from one to another. The only moat I can see is Microsoft providing its services to companies in its Azure system. Nervous IT departments probably like that it's not leaving their control if Bob in the SAP team spins up s…

The adoption of standards like skills and agent setup helps a ton. Nobody wants to be locked into an AI vendor like with cloud systems in general. And companies can't hold on to the #1 spot across multiple areas for very long, so users are even more motivated to move their process and stack between coding tools and AI companies behind them like Claude code.

Vendor lock in cannot happen, or you're bankrupt.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#35
post #21

Is it me or do none of the AI companies have a "moat" in the Ben Grahmm sense. I use their services, but I frankly don't care who provides it. I'll chase the chepest/best and have no issue switching from one to another. The only moat I can see is Microsoft providing its services to companies in its Azure system. Nervous IT departments probably like that it's not leaving their control if Bob in the SAP team spins up s…

Nvidia has a moat. Hardware is hard. No one really competes with them for general compute

General compute is also the worst solution to the problem.

Nvidia's entire business is dependent on Google not being able to make TPUs fast enough.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#36

There is AI data center overcapacity already. The KOSPI crashed last week, and it's a leading indicator for the cyclical hardware industry. It already had been that indicator in the 2000 bubble. I don't know what possessed Ellison to ruin a functioning company, but it will be interesting if he gets a margin call for ORCL's other debt exposures, which are Ellison's massive loans against his ORCL stock.

Well it seems like he bought the “AGI is 2 years away” line. As did… pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley.

yeah.. https://ai-2027.com/

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#37

This is surprising to me. Judging by what appears to be the common sentiment here on HN - which is that AI inference is already profitable, and OpenAI is fairly valued by private markets. Given that Oracle and Microsoft are major counterparties of OpenAI, it seems odd that their stocks have been performing so poorly recently. Can anyone square this circle for me?

HN has been split on this question, with both pro and con strongly and vigorously argued.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#38
post #26

And they terminated 30k employees to achieve this? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/04/06/oracles-m...

When we tried to do a pilot with their cloud we couldn't even sign-up. None of the corporate credit cards were accepted.

In addition to that the form basically only worked in Edge. We emailed support, they changed something on the backend. It still did not work. We gave up.

In retrospective that was a very clear warning sign that their priorities were misguided. I'm glad we did not waste any further time and effort on them.

Re: S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-

#39
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia has a moat. Hardware is hard. No one really competes with them for general compute

AMD Instinct is their direct competitor for compute and they are better per dollar, better per watt, and out competing on raw performance. Only thing holding them back is fab capacity which nVidia keeps buying in bulk to keep them small.

AMD is held back by their interconnect and firmware disadvantage compared to nvidia. They’ve been trying really hard to create their own cuda, but rocM and HIP still aren’t very popular especially for research.
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