Oracle's stock falls for the fifth day in a row - missing out on the AI bounce

By Hannah Pedone

Chip stocks linked to OpenAI rebounded a bit on Tuesday, but Oracle shares extended their losses

Shares of Oracle were down 2% on Tuesday.

Oracle's stock has been known to move in step with the ups and downs of OpenAI's news cycle - and that drove it to its fifth straight drop on Tuesday.

Shares of companies that sell products or services to OpenAI broadly fell on Monday after its leaders and those of other prominent AI companies called for more responsible model development. But as chip stocks rebounded on Tuesday, Oracle's stock (ORCL) was down another 3.1%. It has lost 13.6% over the past five trading days.

Oracle is tightly linked to OpenAI's fate, having taken on debt to help fund a massive expansion in cloud capacity that's meant support the ChatGPT creator's growth ambitions. And there's been a lot of news in the world of OpenAI lately, including recent comments from CEO Sam Altman, who told Fortune that the company won't be targeting an initial public offering this year given the safety backdrop.

Patrick Walravens, head of technology research at Citizens, told MarketWatch that some investors are worried that recent discussions about "pacing the frontier" of AI development - referring to a recent call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow down AI development - could lead to more measured spending by frontier labs including OpenAI and Anthropic.

He also noted that investors may be concerned about possible government regulation of AI, which could also slow spending.

Oracle occupies a unique position, according to D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria. The company has the "backlog" of a hyperscaler, or a large cloud provider, but the risk profile of a neocloud, or a new-age cloud company purpose-built for AI computing needs.

At the end of the August quarter, Oracle reported total remaining performance obligations - a proxy for backlog - of $664 billion.

FactSet also shows the company with $88 billion of net debt.

"If AI slows down, at some point that could reduce the demand for AI compute and the most impacted would be neoclouds, especially ones with leverage," Luria said, referring to AI computing power.

Shares of CoreWeave (CRWV) also dropped for the fifth session in a row, losing 18.9% over that span. Shares of Nebius Group (NBIS) have shed 15% across their own five-day losing streak.

See also: Building U.S. data centers is getting so expensive that AI companies are moving overseas

-Hannah Pedone

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

09-15-26 1631ET