Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone : US Pioneer Global VC DIFCHQ SFO NYC Singapore – Riyadh Swiss Our Mind

Big Red will use debt and equity finance to keep itself in the pink

Oracle has revealed it needs to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, and its plan to raise that money

Big Red on Sunday issued an announcement that explains it is raising money “to build additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from our largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, including AMD, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, TikTok, xAI and others.”

The announcement says Oracle “expects” to raise $45 to $50 billion of gross cash proceeds during the 2026 calendar year alone, using “a balanced combination of debt and equity financing.”

Oracle plans to get its hands on the billions it needs with three tactics.

One is issuing bonds, a move Big Red thinks will win it about half the cash it wants. Oracle also says these are the only bonds it will issue in 2026.

The company will also issue mandatory convertible preferred securities that it says will deliver “a modest portion of the overall equity funding.” The rest will come from “a newly authorized at-the-market equity program of up to $20 billion.”

Some investors weren’t entirely happy last year when Oracle used bonds to raise $18 billion to fund cloud builds, arguing that the debt might create risk.

Big Red’s bulletin twice mentions that it can raise this lot of cash while its stock remains “investment-grade” – an admission that some investors might worry that raising this much cash might be a risky move given the uncertainty surrounding AI. Investors are also likely aware that Oracle’s cloudy competitors – the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – all win $250 billion-plus of annual revenue, compared to Oracle’s $57 billion, and are spending a lot more than Big Red on datacenter infrastructure.

Oracle has told markets it has booked $455 billion of cloudy services it is yet to deliver, and is clearly betting that its expanded cloud will generate so much revenue that bondholders will earn a nice return, while shareholders need not fear the issuance of new equity will dilute value … or dilute it more, given that the database giant’s shares peaked at over $328 in September 2025 but last week went from almost $185 to around $164. ®

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/02/oracle_cloud_expansion_investment_plan/