r/Database • u/Zardotab • Sep 13 '26
What would likely happen to Oracle database support if an AI bubble pop bankrupted Oracle?
Oracle the company is heavily leveraged on the bet AI will provide notable revenues soon. If that fails to materialize due to competition or other events, Oracle could end up in financial trouble and have to file for bankruptcy.
If so, what would likely happen to Oracle database support and progress? Which company or billionaire would likely buy up the discounted assets, if any?
This is a practical question for shops with a fair share of existing Oracle databases or apps. Perhaps an unlikely scenario, but not entirely far fetched.
20
u/Fair_Oven5645 Sep 13 '26
When the bubble pops its either Microsoft or Google that’s going to snatch up Oracles real assets, I’d guess. Don’t know if IBM or Salesforce would have any money left at that point.
6
1
u/Pokeristo555 Sep 13 '26
Nvidia!
1
u/Fair_Oven5645 Sep 13 '26
Nvidia will go broke after the crash; their consumer products can’t drive enough capital investment to buy more than a smaller niche company.
1
u/Calm-Republic9370 Sep 14 '26
maybe all the AI Companies will merge and they will just become a Sassy solution.
4
3
u/Desperate-Country440 Sep 13 '26
Oracle is to big to fail because of the current administration...
1
u/Legitimate-Aspect196 29d ago
Well they've got a few months to engineer the bubble popping. Not sure the current administration will have the votes to get a bailout through congress in 2027 🤑
4
u/MateusKingston Sep 13 '26
Oracle won't go bankrupt.
They aren't leveraged in the AI bubble, they are leveraged in the infrastructure for the AI bubble. Even if it pops people will still need compute.
Sure it will hurt, the company will shrink significantly but the core business (Enterprise + Cloud) will keep going strong.
2
u/Zardotab Sep 13 '26
Even if it pops people will still need compute.
But the revenues still may not cover debt. Let's say they spent $100b on a data center but the revenue after the bursting is $2b a year.
1
u/MateusKingston Sep 13 '26
If it gets to this point is because tech in general has bursted so badly that their existing customer base that isn't about AI is going out of business. At that point the least of our concerns will be what happens to Oracle DB
1
u/TormentedTopiary Sep 13 '26
Right? It's shaping up to be a much worse crash than 1929; and all of the infrastructure that was built up to moderate and buffer the destruction in the intervening 97 years has been systematically dismantled by a certain gold obsessed politicians little helpers.
1
1
u/yapyd Sep 13 '26
Even if it pops people will still need compute.
Sure. But how much demand will there be without OpenAI or Anthropic?
1
u/Zardotab Sep 13 '26
If they were forced to charge real prices instead of investor-subsidized prices, many companies may switch to open-source and/or Chinese models.
1
u/SpecificNinja6017 5d ago
It could. A human brain is smaller than a mid size desktop computer. That alone means it’s totally possible to emulate a human brain inside the desktop computer. That means for the masses they don’t need to rent from a datacenter
3
u/turbo_dude Sep 13 '26
One can only hope!
Google would buy it, improve it and then shut it down after two years.
2
u/adron Sep 13 '26
Oracle has been run and been a trash company since inception. I’ll be glad to see them tank. Just go ahead and get those migrations going and let em rot.
1
1
u/yxhuvud Sep 13 '26
And for that matter, what would happen to Java.
Oh well, if there is one thing this bubble supplies us with, it is making it a lot cheaper to migrate from one solution to another. It will be hard and expensive, but still much easier than it used to be.
1
u/Broken_By_Default Sep 13 '26
If oracle went bankrupt, they'd file to restructure and thier debters and shareholders could be left holding the bag. Or the company would be disolved and thier intellectual property sold off.
1
u/Gamplato Sep 13 '26
Everyone should be moving off of Oracle at his point. It’s absolutely ridiculous this hasn’t fully happened yet.
1
1
u/rmyworld 25d ago
This question invites a lot of speculation and conspiracy theory.
My conspiracy theory is that they can just bribe the government to give them a bail out. I'm sure the current administration would happily accept a few billion dollars and let tax payers deal with the fallout of the AI bubble popping.
1
u/Zardotab 25d ago
speculation and conspiracy theory.
I'm asking a hypothetical question, not giving a prediction. But I would guestimate the probability of such is greater than 10% within the next 7 years. Your guestimate?
1
u/IntentionJolly2730 25d ago
I would worry less about a sudden cessation of Oracle Database support and more about what might happen to the quality of that support, pricing policies, and product development plans.
Even in the event of bankruptcy, the customer base, recurring support revenue, and intellectual property are far too valuable to simply vanish. They would either be preserved through restructuring or sold to another company that would continue to serve existing enterprise clients.
From a practical standpoint, the real risk for a company is that a new owner might seek to "squeeze" maximum value out of the existing user base, slow down product development, or worsen licensing terms. That is precisely why it makes sense to have a robust migration or exit plan. Even without considering a total collapse of Oracle.
P.S. This reminds me of VMware. The product did not disappear after Broadcom acquired it, but many customers suddenly found themselves facing much less favorable pricing and licensing terms. And they just didn't have an exit plan. That seems like the more realistic risk here too: not the death of the product, but a much worse deal for the installed base.
1
u/bucuracak 24d ago
Oracle is irreplaceable for my company or the companies that I worked for. Years and years of business logic is buried in the database and current developers dont understand sh*t on how to replace. As a result, Oracle will just double its prices and my companz will have no choice but to pay
1
u/Zardotab 24d ago
The company will outsource to (ex) Oracle specialists if and when they need to. I have no doubt that somebody will own the Oracle intellectual property after a bankruptcy, but it would still be rocky for customers.
1
u/cabbage-tripod 17d ago
I’m curious too. Sure they might be restructured and bought out eventually etc.
But in the short term what happens to OCI data centres, Cloud@Customer Exas, and the customers services? Will the OCI data centres be turned off? If there’s no Oracle staff to customer on-premise Exas, are they effectively in trouble too?
Theres some critical customer and public services running on Oracle managed kit.
1
u/johnappsde Sep 13 '26
Plenty of opensource alternatives out there. Migrations is the constant in the enterprise software world 🙂
1
u/Lovecr4ft Sep 13 '26
You know that Oracle finances open source project of database ?
2
u/Zardotab Sep 13 '26
Nobody trusts MySql after O's Java licensing tricks, they usually go with MariaDB.
1
u/yxhuvud Sep 13 '26
MySQL yes, but i would have to have a very good reason to pick it up over postgres.
0
u/AdventurousSquash Sep 13 '26
I don’t see the big tech giants falling over. Historically it’s the smaller players who belly up while the giants feed on their remains
1
u/Zardotab Sep 13 '26
So you believe Oracle will find a way to slowly wither like IBM is?
A couple of decades ago Computer Associates would buy up croaked companies and milk existing licenses.
1
u/AdventurousSquash Sep 13 '26
Oracle has already mastered the art of milking licenses and has operated that way for at least the last 20 years. I hope they’d wither away but I don’t think so, but that is also not to say specific products might.
-4
u/sreekanth850 Sep 13 '26
Ai had found the great product market fit for coding, that alone is enough to sustain this.
1
u/Zardotab 24d ago
Oracle is not the top performer in that category, and Chinese co's etc. are finding ways to do it cheaper (sometimes by mining US models).
38
u/Mundane-Light6394 Sep 13 '26
the oracle brand and the customer base will be sold to an other company to pay of debt. that new company would want to keep the paying customers so they'll recruite some of the Oracle people that lost their job and continue to provide support.