Oracle move opens questions for AI’s investment boom

When historians look back on the artificial intelligence (AI) boom of the mid-2020s, one of the things that may well stand out is the sheer amount of cash companies are lashing into the space.

OpenAI, the marquee name in the sector, has raised tens of billions of dollars itself but has an astronomical $1.4 trillion (€1.2 trillion) in data centre commitments over the next eight years, chief executive Sam Altman has said. That’s not a typo: trillion.

In September, Oracle signed a deal worth $300 billion with OpenAI to build huge data centres to drive the firm’s computing power. Those data centres were due to start coming online in 2027.

Yet barely three months later, Oracle has reportedly pushed out the completion date for some of those centres to 2028.

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According to Bloomberg News, Oracle is pushing the date back amid material and labour shortages, which makes sense considering how tight the market is at the moment.

It is perhaps, though, one of the early signs that not all of those $1.4 trillion data centre commitments for OpenAI will ultimately be fulfilled. At least not on the current timeline.

A new report from EY shows that a record $87 billion of venture capital funding globally went into so-called generative AI firms in the first 11 months of 2025, up about 350 per cent on 2023 levels, as sovereign wealth funds started to pile into the sector.

Indeed, while the value of deals has spiked, the volume of investments dropped sharply so far this year, from just over 1,200 in 2024 to fewer than 750 so far in 2025.

[ OpenAI chief Sam Altman: ‘This is genius-level intelligence’Opens in new window ]

What does that tell us about AI today? It tells us that it is becoming a more mature market as people start to figure out, or at least guess, the long term winners. It also tells us that deeper pockets are coming into the sector.

But where things go from here remains something of an open question.

There have been a lot of big numbers thrown about in the AI boom. One wonders how we will view those numbers when we look back in 20 years’ time.