OpenAI’s Cash Crunch Sends Oracle Shares Tumbling, But Analysts See a Buying Opportunity

Oracle shares drop over 6% after report OpenAI may struggle to pay for cloud capacity, threatening a $300B deal and sparking broad tech selloff.

Oracle’s stock took a beating on Tuesday, sliding more than six percent as a Wall Street Journal report raised fresh doubts about the financial health of its marquee customer, OpenAI. The selloff pushed shares to around €142, roughly 49 percent below the 52-week high hit last September, and left the stock technically oversold with a relative strength index of 26.5.

The trigger was a report that OpenAI had missed its internal target of reaching one billion weekly active users by the end of 2025. According to the Journal, CFO Sarah Friar warned company leaders that if revenue growth doesn’t pick up, OpenAI might struggle to honor future contracts for computing capacity. That’s a direct concern for Oracle, which signed a five-year, $300 billion deal to supply cloud infrastructure to the ChatGPT developer — the linchpin of its artificial intelligence growth story.

The competitive landscape is shifting, too. ChatGPT’s share of generative AI web traffic has fallen from 86.7 percent to 64.5 percent over the past year, while Google’s Gemini has surged from 5.7 percent to 21.5 percent. Anthropic is also gaining ground in the enterprise segment.

OpenAI pushed back against the report, telling CNBC the claims were “absurd” and insisting it remains “fully aligned” on buying as much computing capacity as possible. Still, the damage was done — not just to Oracle. SoftBank, which owns a 13 percent stake in OpenAI, lost nearly ten percent in Tokyo trading. CoreWeave, which holds cloud contracts worth up to $22.4 billion with OpenAI, fell 7.6 percent in pre-market trading. Chipmakers Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD dropped between three and five percent.

A $50 Billion Capital Hunt

The OpenAI jitters land at an awkward moment for Oracle, which is in the middle of an aggressive infrastructure buildout. The company is currently seeking $50 billion in fresh financing through a mix of debt and equity instruments, with around $30 billion already secured. Total debt has climbed 60 percent to a record $153 billion.

Much of that spending is tied to Project Jupiter, a massive AI data center in New Mexico that will run on Bloom Energy fuel cells with a capacity of up to 2.45 gigawatts. Oracle scrapped plans for gas turbines and diesel generators at the site, a move that cuts carbon emissions by roughly 92 percent. The company is also footing the entire energy bill for the facility to shield local ratepayers from price spikes.

In the Midwest, Oracle is building a $16 billion campus in Michigan and financing a new battery storage system for the site. The company’s contracted but unbilled revenue — a measure of future commitments — has swelled to $553 billion.

Morgan Stanley’s credit team estimates Oracle’s total capital needs for 2027 and the first half of 2028 could exceed $100 billion. Last week, the Journal reported that banks including JPMorgan have struggled to offload credit risk tied to Oracle’s data center financing.

Wall Street Stays the Course

Despite the selloff, most analysts remain bullish. Of the 44 analysts tracked by Koyfin, 34 rate the stock a buy, with an average price target implying roughly 40 percent upside. Wedbush’s Dan Ives reaffirmed his “outperform” rating and $225 price target on April 24, arguing the market is misreading Oracle’s investment push as a risk rather than a long-term infrastructure build.

The Wedbush team sees the selloff as an overreaction, pointing to broad demand for GPU infrastructure beyond OpenAI. While OpenAI remains an anchor client under a five-year contract, Oracle is increasingly serving a diversified base of AI developers.

The real test comes in June, when Oracle reports quarterly earnings and provides concrete figures on order intake from the OpenAI deal. Until then, investors are left weighing a record $553 billion backlog against a $153 billion debt pile — and wondering whether the company’s biggest customer can keep paying its bills.