Oracle’s AI Gambit: Ellison Bets Big on Stargate and TikTok While Markets Watch
Larry Ellison dominated 2025 by straddling Washington, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. Oracle’s chairman became the connective tissue between Trump’s WHITE House, TikTok’s US survival strategy, and a $500B AI infrastructure play called Stargate—all while Oracle stock gyrated with each headline.
The 81-year-old tech billionaire positioned Oracle as critical infrastructure for the AI era. January’s announcement with Trump, Sam Altman, and Masayoshi Son promised 100,000 jobs and hyperscale data centers. Skeptics questioned the math; Ellison deployed capital anyway, pushing Oracle’s cash FLOW negative for the first time in three decades.
By summer, Oracle secured OpenAI as its anchor tenant—a coup that validated Ellison’s late-cycle cloud pivot. The MOVE came alongside parallel negotiations for a TikTok stake, blending geopolitics with enterprise tech in ways only Ellison could engineer.