{"id":515597,"date":"2026-04-06T09:31:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T09:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/515597\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T09:31:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T09:31:15","slug":"the-biggest-risk-for-us-at-oracle-would-be-avoiding-the-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/515597\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The biggest risk for us at Oracle would be avoiding the AI race\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Sicilia is certainly not the first big technology boss to go back to his roots and he won\u2019t be the last. <\/p>\n

On a flying visit to London as part of Oracle\u2019s AI World Tour, Sicilia, the co-chief executive of the software giant weighing in with a stock market value of $420 billion, told The Times he was having a \u201cton of fun\u201d getting back into coding and being a computer programmer again, something he has not done for years. <\/p>\n

His enthusiasm stems from the advances in artificial intelligence<\/a> and generative AI specifically, which allows anyone to tell their computer in plain English what to create. \u201cStunningly impressive,\u201d is his verdict so far, although he does add swiftly that none of his coding efforts have made their way into Oracle\u2019s systems, yet.<\/p>\n

Sicilia\u2019s own coding attempts, however, show how vulnerable jobs are in tech. Oracle recently announced it is setting aside an extra $500\u00a0million this financial year to cover restructuring costs, making a total of $2.1\u00a0billion. There are reports that up to 30,000 jobs could go. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be premature to guess at our staffing levels,\u201d he said. \u201cIf there are situations where AI makes certain roles redundant, then we owe it to shareholders to make sure that we\u2019re running the company as efficiently as we can.\u201d Not long after this interview, the company started making significant redundancies.<\/p>\n

The computer science graduate is an Oracle lifer who joined the company in 2008 when it acquired his previous employer, the software business Primavera. Having been president of Oracle Industries, he took over as co-chief executive alongside Clay Magouyrk in September last year. <\/p>\n

Just six months after taking up his new post, he has his own AI agent and can say to it: \u201cI think there\u2019s a bug. I don\u2019t think this is right.\u201d It responds with: \u201cYes, you\u2019re right. Let me go fix this.\u201d It is a phenomenon which he says he has never quite experienced before, when workloads have gone from taking months to mere hours.<\/p>\n

\"OracleOracle\u2019s UK headquarters in the Thames Valley business park Alamy<\/p>\n

Sicilia\u2019s day job \u2014 away from chatting to his AI agent \u2014 is running a huge technology business, even if many might struggle to identify exactly what it does. Travellers heading west out of London will have noticed the vast Oracle campus of offices on the outskirts of Reading. <\/p>\n

Oracle is, in fact, pretty much akin to the world\u2019s most powerful digital filing cabinet and landlord, providing the heavy-duty databases, office apps and cloud computing real estate that major global organisations need to exist. The company, so wrapped up in the essential nuts and bolts of keeping the worldwide technology network working, has also recently acquired a 15\u00a0per cent stake in TikTok US.<\/p>\n

Founded in California in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Oracle joined the stock market on March 12, 1986, at $15 a share. Last week the stock closed at $146.38. Ellison, the executive chairman, chief technology officer and, aged 81, still a major personality in the tech world, owns roughly 40\u00a0per cent of the business. He has also been in the news for his close relationship with President Trump<\/a>. <\/p>\n

But most recently Ellison has been the talk of Hollywood \u2014 and far, far beyond \u2014 for his part in the successful $111\u00a0billion bid for Warner Bros Discovery<\/a> by Paramount Skydance, headed by his son David. The deal is very heavily underwritten by Oracle stock held in Ellison family trusts. <\/p>\n

\"LarryLarry Ellison with his son David Eric Charbonneau\/Getty Images for The Hollywood Reporter)<\/p>\n

But any possible clouds on Sicilia\u2019s horizon are for another day. At almost 50 years old, Oracle is now a middle-aged company trying to ensure it remains relevant. As Sicilia puts it: \u201cThe biggest risk we would have as a company would be not being part of the AI race.\u201d Oracle is not taking that risk. It is part of the $500\u00a0billion US Stargate AI infrastructure programme, along with SoftBank and OpenAI. In September it emerged that OpenAI had signed a $300\u00a0billion deal with Oracle for computing power.<\/p>\n

To fund this spending, Oracle has made some of the largest debt issuances in the tech sector. In February it announced plans to raise up to $50\u00a0billion in debt and equity financing, although it has said it will not go any further this year. Within days it had successfully raised $30\u00a0billion in an oversubscribed round, yet this level of borrowing did not go down well with investors and Oracle\u2019s valuation went on a rollercoaster ride.<\/p>\n

In September Ellison, albeit briefly, became the world\u2019s richest man when the share price hit a record high of $345.69. By mid-December, that had sunk to about $180. This came as S&P Global gave the company a \u201cnegative outlook\u201d and described Oracle\u2019s credit profile as \u201cstrained by accelerating AI infrastructure growth\u201d. The credit ratings agency estimated that OpenAI could account for more than a third of Oracle\u2019s revenues by 2028, tying its fate to the success of the ChatGPT<\/a> maker.<\/p>\n

However, Oracle\u2019s recent set of earnings at the start of March this year won plaudits from analysts. Revenue for the quarter was $17.2\u00a0billion, ahead of expectations, and it raised its revenue guidance for the year to $90\u00a0billion. Last week Bank of America reinstated its Oracle coverage and put a \u201cbuy\u201d rating on the stock.<\/p>\n

The picture is still far from rosy. A group of shareholders is suing Oracle, alleging the company misled investors who bought the company\u2019s stock at the end of last year about the scale, timing and financial impact of its AI data centre buildout. There is also a lawsuit by some bondholders alleging they were misled when Oracle issued $18\u00a0billion in notes and bonds in September 2025 and then returned seven weeks later for $38\u00a0billion of further loans.<\/p>\n

Sicilia declines to comment on open legal proceedings. But he robustly defends the company\u2019s investment plans, arguing that if Oracle avoided these investments, stakeholders would question why they were \u201cmissing the boat\u201d, especially since current demand for AI capacity far outstrips supply. It is a \u201cbalanced plan\u201d.<\/p>\n

The data centres Oracle builds are \u201cfungible\u201d, he claims, meaning their use can switch quickly, regardless of the technology inside them. This is vital as chips advance rapidly and tenants change. Oracle is at the heart of fears over circular deals \u2014 arrangements where tech companies invest in or buy from one another. Critics argue Oracle is spending tens of billions building AI infrastructure whose value depends heavily on OpenAI\u2019s promise to buy compute from Oracle.<\/p>\n

\"IllustrationDado Ruvic\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Sicilia shrugs this off, saying he feels \u201cvery good\u201d about the deal with OpenAI, noting the AI lab\u2019s recent $120\u00a0billion investment round. He repeats that the flexibility of data centres acts as a safety net, even in the \u201cextreme event that there wouldn\u2019t be an OpenAI\u201d. Any capacity originally intended for OpenAI could easily be repurposed for other customers in a matter of hours, he says.<\/p>\n

Sovereign AI has become a \u201cblazing hot topic\u201d and Sicilia is acutely aware of the demand, especially from heavily regulated industries such as banks. The company is investing $5\u00a0billion in the UK over the next five years, where it counts the government among its customers. Asked about worries that US infrastructure in Europe could be shut off under political pressure, he responds that despite occasional disagreements, allied nations will continue to stand together.<\/p>\n

Physical infrastructure aside, AI\u2019s ability to write software has led many to predict the demise of the software industry, a \u201cSAAS-pocalypse\u201d (software-as-a-service sector). Sicilia is categorical that \u201cthis applies to others but not to us\u201d. As the \u201ccustodian\u201d of \u201cmission-critical data\u201d, Oracle can embed AI agents directly into the systems that run their customers\u2019 daily operations, he says.<\/p>\n

Despite the inevitable pain of the AI transition, Sicilia is a techno optimist. \u201cEvery single other technical revolution that we\u2019ve been through has been accretive to GDP or entrepreneurship,\u201d he insists. \u201cCan we increase the longevity of human lives? Can we make real progress against cancer? My hope is that this will lead to an even greater level of entrepreneurship, going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mike Sicilia is certainly not the first big technology boss to go back to his roots and he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-515597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}