Honestly, most people still think of Oracle as that "old school" database company your dad used to work for. You know the one. Clunky software, aggressive salespeople in suits, and a logo that hasn't changed since the 90s. But if you haven't been paying attention to what Larry Ellison has been doing lately—especially in this weird, hyper-accelerated start to 2026—you’re missing one of the most aggressive pivots in tech history.
Larry Ellison isn't just a billionaire who owns a Hawaiian island. He’s currently the third-richest person on the planet, with a net worth hovering around $245.3 billion as of January 2026. He even briefly touched the #1 spot last year. Why? Because while everyone else was arguing about which chatbot was "smarter," Ellison was busy turning Oracle into the actual physical backbone of the AI era.
👉 See also: I Deleted My Gmail Account: How to Recover It Before Google Wipes Everything
The Trillion-Dollar Pivot
It’s easy to joke about Larry’s yachts or his $45 million Pacific Heights home sale that just closed in December. But the numbers coming out of Oracle right now are actually kind of terrifying for their competitors. In their fiscal Q2 2026 earnings call just a few weeks ago, the company revealed a "Remaining Performance Obligation" (RPO) of **$523 billion**.
That is half a trillion dollars in contracted revenue just sitting there, waiting to be billed.
Most of that isn't from old-fashioned database licenses. It's for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Ellison has basically bet the entire house on the idea that training AI models on the "public internet" is a dead end. He recently called it out, saying that every model is starting to look the same because they’re all reading the same books.
His new play? Private data.
🔗 Read more: Pluto Pictures: Why the Heart Still Matters Ten Years Later
Oracle is positioning itself as the only place where a massive corporation can take their most sensitive, private records—stuff they would never give to OpenAI or Google—and use it to train "reasoning" models without the data leaking. It's a "walled garden" strategy, but on a global enterprise scale. To make this happen, they are spending like crazy. We're talking about $50 billion in capital expenditures just for this year. That’s more than some countries spend on their entire military.
Why the "Cloud Wars" Changed
For a long time, Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) just ignored Oracle. They were the giants, and Oracle was the legacy player trying to catch up. That’s not the vibe anymore.
- The GPU Superclusters: Oracle is currently building a 50,000-GPU AI supercluster using AMD MI450 chips, slated for later in 2026.
- The Zettascale10: They’ve got a "Zettascale" supercomputer in the works that connects hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs.
- The Partnership Paradox: In a move nobody saw coming a few years ago, Oracle is now "inside" its competitors. You can literally run Oracle databases natively inside Google Cloud and Azure now.
It’s a weird "frenemy" situation. Microsoft and Google realized they couldn't just replace the massive, complex Oracle databases that run the world's banks and hospitals. So, they let Larry move in. Now, Oracle’s multicloud revenue is growing at triple-digit percentages. It's a classic Ellison move: if you can't beat them, make yourself so essential that they have to invite you to the party.
The Man Behind the Machine
Larry Ellison is 81 years old. In "tech years," he should be retired on a beach in Lanai (which he basically owns 98% of anyway). Instead, he’s more active than ever. He’s recently been involved in a massive $40 billion guarantee for a Paramount bid and is deeply tied into the future of TikTok’s U.S. operations.
He’s also part of the "billionaire exodus" from California. Between the new wealth tax proposals and the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, Larry has been quietly offloading his San Francisco assets. He’s gone "full Hawaii," using Zoom to run a global empire from a remote island.
But don't let the "island life" fool you into thinking he's gone soft. The culture at Oracle is still remarkably intense. They just finished a massive reorganization of their sales teams, smashing together their "Industry" and "Fusion" units to hunt for even bigger AI contracts.
What’s actually different about Oracle’s AI?
If you talk to any engineer who actually uses OCI, they’ll tell you it feels different from AWS. It’s less of a "build your own adventure" and more of a "here is a high-performance race car, don't touch the engine."
Oracle’s 26ai Database is the current flagship. It uses something called "AI Vector Search," which basically lets the database "understand" data rather than just looking for keywords. If a hospital wants to find every patient with a specific, rare heart condition across millions of handwritten notes and scans, the 26ai system can "reason" its way through that data in real-time.
This is the "Phase 2" Ellison keeps talking about. Phase 1 was training chatbots. Phase 2 is making AI actually do work for big, boring, high-stakes industries like healthcare and logistics.
The Risks Nobody Mentions
Is everything perfect? No.
Oracle’s traditional software revenue—the old stuff—is actually shrinking. It dropped about 3% last quarter. They are cannibalizing their own business to move everyone to the cloud. It’s a risky "innovator's dilemma" play. If they don't move fast enough, they lose the old revenue before the new cloud revenue turns a real profit.
There’s also the debt. Building data centers that cost billions of dollars requires a lot of borrowing. While Wall Street loves the $523 billion backlog, they aren't as thrilled about the shrinking margins.
And then there's the competition. NVIDIA and Meta are currently huge Oracle customers, but they are also building their own internal capabilities. If the "AI bubble" ever pops—or even just deflates—Oracle is the company most exposed because of that massive $50 billion investment in hardware.
🔗 Read more: Why Your Cell Animal Project 3D Is Failing (And How to Fix It)
How to Navigate the Oracle Ecosystem in 2026
If you’re a business leader or a tech professional, you can't ignore the "Ellison Effect" anymore. Here is the reality of dealing with the new Oracle:
- Don't buy "old" Oracle: If a salesperson tries to sell you a traditional on-premise license, walk away. All the innovation (and the best pricing) is happening in OCI and the 26ai cloud services.
- Look at the Multicloud play: You don't have to leave Azure or Google Cloud to use Oracle anymore. If you have high-performance data needs, look into the "Oracle Database@Google Cloud" or Azure equivalent. It’s often faster than the native cloud databases.
- Leverage the AI Superclusters: If you’re doing serious LLM training, Oracle’s GPU availability is often better than AWS right now because they’ve been more aggressive with their hardware orders.
- Prepare for the "Private Data" shift: Start cleaning your internal data now. Oracle’s pitch only works if your data is actually usable by their reasoning agents.
The story of Oracle and Larry Ellison is really a story of survival. In a world where tech companies go extinct every decade, Ellison has managed to keep his company relevant for nearly 50 years. He did it by being meaner, faster, and more willing to spend money than anyone else. Whether you like him or not, the "Red Giant" is officially back, and this time, it's powered by the most expensive AI hardware on the planet.
To stay ahead of these shifts, companies should begin auditing their legacy database structures to ensure they are "vector-ready" for the 26ai migration. Relying on public AI models for business intelligence is becoming a competitive disadvantage; the move toward private, secure inferencing is the primary trend to watch through the rest of 2026.