Investors are wary of Oracle's reliance on OpenAI.
Oracle might have an OpenAI problem.
Oracle (ORCL) stock has tumbled over 40% from its September peak, erasing more than $360 billion from its market capitalization. Nearly $67 billion of that decline occurred on Thursday alone, as Oracle’s second quarter results failed to assuage a key concern for investors — that the company is too heavily reliant on OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).
Oracle’s AI-fueled growth targets outlined in its first quarter sent the stock to a record on Sept. 10, briefly making its founder, Larry Ellison, the world's richest man. In September, the company told investors its remaining performance obligations (RPO) — or the value of its future revenue from customer contracts signed — had soared nearly 360% to $455 billion.
It was later revealed that ChatGPT developer OpenAI accounted for at least $300 billion of its customer commitments as part of the Stargate project. Since then, its stock has struggled.
Rising concerns about OpenAI’s mounting costs — set to hit $1.4 trillion due to its deal spree with firms including Nvidia (NVDA), CoreWeave (CRWV), AMD (AMD), and Broadcom (AVGO), in addition to Oracle — and increasing competition from Google's (GOOG) Gemini models have made investors even more wary.
"Clearly there's been a reversal in terms of the market's perception of OpenAI in the last couple of months," BNB Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski told Yahoo Finance. “The OpenAI ecosystem obviously has been suffering as a result.”
Slowinski and other Wall Street analysts agree that OpenAI’s potential inability to pay for its wide-ranging AI infrastructure commitments is Oracle’s biggest risk.
Read more: How to protect your portfolio from an AI bubble
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a “code red” last week as the upstart faces greater rivalry from Google, threatening its ability to monetize its AI products and meet its ambitious revenue targets.
"[Oracle is] in this tough situation where they have to build out [data center] capacity for this customer and borrow a lot of money to do that when there's a very high uncertainty this customer will be able to pay for that capacity," DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.
Oracle’s second quarter results this week only deepened investor concerns.
The company’s $12 billion in capital expenditures was higher than expected, just as its free cash flow loss of $10 billion was much heavier than the $6 billion outflow anticipated. Oracle also substantially hiked its full-year capital expenditures forecast to $50 billion from $35 billion.
Executives’ attempts to quell worries over the company's high debt load, rising costs, and dependence on OpenAI didn’t help.
In a call following Oracle’s earnings report, new co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said the company has more than 700 AI customers. He said Oracle could easily redirect its AI infrastructure to service other customers in “hours” if demand from any single customer fails to materialize.
"If there were an issue where OpenAI couldn't pay their bills, they have the quick ability to repurpose the infrastructure for other customers," TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood explained in an interview.
The company also said it won’t need to spend more than $100 billion to complete its data center projects and committed to maintaining an investment-grade credit rating — as investors have fretted over its BBB rating on its bonds, just notches away from junk status. Oracle also highlighted that its RPO grew by $68 billion in the latest quarter due to new commitments from Nvidia, Meta (META), and other customers.
Slowinski said that, in theory, such commentary should have appeased investors. But broader concerns over the payoff on tech firms’ investments in AI prevented that.
"Right now, the market's just saying, 'We don't have confidence in the returns and all this capex,'” he said.
Laura Bratton is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Bluesky @laurabratton.bsky.social. Email her at laura.bratton@yahooinc.com.
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Comments
Oracle has bigger problems than OpenAI. They've been selling large enterprise contracts for the past 10 years and they're coming up for renewal. A lot of those enterprises don't feel they got a good value. If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years, then that could have a severe impact to Oracle. Their other issue is a lot of those enterprises are looking at migrating to PostgreSQL so they can migrate off of Oracle's RDBMS. Many have already deployed PostgreSQL for their department-level applications, so they can get the experience they need before tackling their enterprise-level applications.
In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle.
We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used.
Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA).
I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.
I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.
The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.
Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.
So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.
Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.
Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
It's wild dealing with Oracle. They are an adversary to their customers. They'll repeatedly try and setup meetings where they begin off-topic asking questions about how many cores/sockets you're deployed on (Answer: Fewer than we're paying for). When we declined their Java subscription (after thorough preparation on our part), they repeatedly threatened us with audits and ominous threats of download monitoring.
If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.
By ethbr1 2025-12-1221:19 > If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.
Oof. That's a new standard for shitty company: when ex-employees build a business around protecting customers from their former employer.
By scrubs 2025-12-136:46 Nvidia is adversarial too, and a giant pain to deal with. But then since the 1980s there's been a slow pendulum move to suppliers having more actual and self-perceived power over customers. I'm a big proponent of respectfully letting the supplier know when needed I tell them they don't me if I am satisfied or whether its worth the $ spent on them. Always have options. Without options there's no choice. Internal suppliers (in a corp) periodically need to be told the same thing. Mishandling one's customer power in the relationship is an error i don't like to make.
By jiggawatts 2025-12-1219:491 reply You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.
This was in the early days of HANA, I'm sure they've fixed the defects by now, but it was shocking to pay nose-bleed prices for every 64gb shard, and then have basic SQL return provably incorrect results. It was a catastrophe, and after spending heavily on consultants to work around the defects, the organization eventually switched to SQL Server.
By jiggawatts 2025-12-138:261 reply > return provably incorrect results.
Again, you're burying the lede here.
It's like the Linux fanboi stating without evidence that Windows will just accept any user name without a password, and then refusing to elaborate on that claim. Like... wat?
SAP HANA may have its faults, but I've never heard of pervasive data corruption as one of them.
By spwa4 2025-12-139:49 > It's like the Linux fanboi stating without evidence that Windows will just accept any user name without a password, and then refusing to elaborate on that claim. Like... wat?
Did you enter the correct NSAKEY username?
By senectus1 2025-12-138:21 yup same thing here. their bullshit legal antics has made us allergic to oracle
Aren’t contract expiration dates distributed over time? Why would now be a particularly vulnerable time? Granted, we’re coming up on the end of the calendar year, but 2025 doesn’t feel particularly special.
Also, how does one come upon these kinds of bits of industry lore? Asking for a daytrader friend. Ahem
I've found the only stocks where I can personally be successful stock picking are companies I have some sort of unique relationship or experience with that is uncommon or unavailable to sophisticated investors or analysts.
E.g. you're an IT admin at Big Co overseeing software contracts. You can often get interesting insights by looking at things like how aggressive their sales reps are with end of quarter discounts (how desperate are they to meet numbers that quarter?). Or if you see a company completely dropping the ball within your org, but on CNBC you constantly hear how great the company is by pundits and analysts -- maybe you know something the pundits don't.
Often times the consensus view of a stock trails reality by a few weeks to a month - there's a lot of non-public but also non-confidential information that isn't readily available to analysts, but exposed to employees of customers/vendors/partners/end-users.
TLDR: when stock picking or day trading, pick companies within the niche of the world where you're a SME.
By master_crab 2025-12-1222:33 Insider trading isn’t because he has non-public information. It’s based on trust/fiduciary responsibilities. It would be a hard sell to claim he betrayed anyone’s trust by trading on the performance he saw as a customer.
That’s not insider trading. It’s using nonpublic information, legally.
The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.
By koolba 2025-12-1220:35 > The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.
That's why I always shout my inside information within earshot of my financial adviser but never actually place any trades myself.
By stronglikedan 2025-12-1218:051 reply I also have to wonder how many customers actually signed a 10 year contract (which is extremely long for software of all things), unless I'm misunderstanding the comment.
By financetechbro 2025-12-1218:362 reply Yeah 10yr long contracts aren’t the norm. Typically 3-5 years if it’s not on annual basis
They are for large infrastructure projects, especially at large organisations.
It takes companies 3-5 years for migration of these products, all of which are not CapEx funded and so get minimal resourcing without prioritisation by leadership.
By ethbr1 2025-12-1221:22 Also, for anything with a 3-5 year implementation period, a longer contract aligns incentives.
The vendor isn't incentivized to fuck you over on renewal pricing as soon as the implementation is complete.
And because of the size of the contract, the customer has more leverage at renewal time.
By taylodl 2025-12-1313:38 Not for Oracle's "everything but the kitchen sink" unlimited enterprise licenses for large (Fortune 200) organizations that, like a buffet, encourage you to "eat more" to get a "better value." Which works great until you true-up after 10 years and your annual license fee skyrockets. Which is of course Oracle's plan. But, what I've been seeing happen instead, and this is purely anecdotal, is these companies are getting tired of paying tens of millions of dollars per year to Oracle as CIOs are under ever-increasing pressure to cut costs. So they're wary of allowing themselves to fall further into Oracle's clutches and in fact they're looking at how to get themselves out of this situation.
TL;DR - these 10 year enterprise deals with Oracle allowed companies to save money in the short run and get predictable annual licensing fees. It also bought them time to get more of their application portfolio off of Oracle so when it comes time to re-up they'll negotiate those fees down.
By OccamsMirror 2025-12-1217:352 reply Can confirm. There is zero good will towards Oracle in my organization, and AWS have positioned themselves in a way to push the enterprise team to using PostgreSQL on RDS, and helping development teams make the move with training and proservices. Oracle's greed is finally coming back to haunt them.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"
By throw0101a 2025-12-1914:41 By Malic 2025-12-1316:56 Evergreen :)
But how hard is it for your companies to migrate?
Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
By hylaride 2025-12-1218:04 I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc.
My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources.
The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.
By zamadatix 2025-12-1217:49 If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already.
In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.
Probably nobody here is an Oracle fan but the miss on sentiment like this is you could have written the same comment minus OpenAI 10 and maybe even 20 years ago.
Definitely true, but a lot of Oracle sites are that way because of decisions made decades ago. Opportunities to re-architect are rare. But when those opportunities do come along, nobody is choosing Oracle RDBMS for their future state.
What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle.
Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.
By kev009 2025-12-1219:09 They have some funny accounting like Google and Microsoft where everything is "cloud" but the revenue streams are certainly diversified from straight Oracle DB such that PostgreSQL equivalence or superiority does not affect the viability of the company or the stock price. Communities like this often over index technical and personal opinion with reality.
I worked at a midsize that was core internet infra, where we had an in house OS and ODM hardware and FOSS DBAs. The one Oracle DB and Oracle HW was slipped in the door through finance for ERP as you say. Although I suspect that would be cloud hosted these days.
By lateforwork 2025-12-1217:522 reply > If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years
Think about how hard it would be for you to switch from iPhone to Android. Now multiply that by 10000. That's how hard it is to switch enterprise software.
By collingreen 2025-12-1217:5410 reply Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it
> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it
only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.
There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.
I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.
By collingreen 2025-12-1222:56 That's absolutely true. Is also true for most projects in general though so pretty standard.
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2025-12-1218:45 It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.
Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”
By mystifyingpoi 2025-12-1218:511 reply True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example):
- Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters?
- No way in hell!
- What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each?
- Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2025-12-1219:012 reply How is that realistic? If you offer me insane money, I will of course bluster that I can do the impossible. When I inevitably fail, I still have a pocket full of cash.
By chasd00 2025-12-1219:18 It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.
By tracerbulletx 2025-12-1220:472 reply Just write Kubernetes for Kubernetes to manage the kubernetes. duh
That's a joke. but unironically you could manage 1000 Kubernetes clusters with automation. why not?
By mystifyingpoi 2025-12-1318:37 You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.
By Lapsa 2025-12-1314:55 use ChatGPT for Kubernetes
By sharpy 2025-12-1218:05 Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.
Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.
By PunchyHamster 2025-12-1218:432 reply Then just don't migrate to MS SQL but to Postgres
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2025-12-1218:47 Big enterprise businesses want support contracts for someone to blame. Yes, you can find Postgres support, but switching to a different devil is the far more common option.
By Invictus0 2025-12-1218:57 "just"
By crackez 2025-12-1219:11 That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.
It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.
By mystifyingpoi 2025-12-1218:54 It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings.
So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.
By prepend 2025-12-1220:14 Now imagine you risk breaking $100M in order to save $10M.
By pfortuny 2025-12-1219:25 Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…
Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy.
There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that.
Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.
The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)
By arjie 2025-12-1221:13 So you did, I did not pick up that you meant peer vendors which is pretty obvious on re-reading. I believed you were saying that Enterprise Vendors (who are often Oracle customers) would jump to save $10m. But that wasn't what your question was.
By esafak 2025-12-1218:40 Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.
By boringg 2025-12-1218:20 Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few
By anal_reactor 2025-12-1219:38 Once technologies mature enough, they converge to roughly the same set of features. Case in point: I was an avid Windows user, but then decided to switch to Linux. While it was problematic, it was much less so than I had anticipated.
Imagine switching between Firefox and Chrome. Between Ford and Toyota. Between Seagate and Western Digital. Between USB-C and Lightning.
By mbesto 2025-12-1218:55 Oracle's growth and value is in SaaS apps (NetSuite) and their cloud offering, not DB licensing. The economic impact of enterprises moving off Oracle DB is massively overstated here.
By justapassenger 2025-12-1218:03 Oracle has been selling large enterprise contracts for many decades and those enterprises were looking to migrate off Oracle since then too (I've been working on a project like that almost 20 years ago, at my first real job).
By bdangubic 2025-12-1218:48 I read very similar comments … 10-15 years ago
By websiteapi 2025-12-1218:07 Sources for any of these claims?
By moralestapia 2025-12-1218:101 reply >In business since 1977.
>Market cap of half a trillion.
>Somehow they're "in trouble".
Mega LMAO.
There are enough examples which one might mention here: Nokia, MySpace, Yahoo, Kodac, AOL, Blockbuster, toys‘r‘us … all ones big. Yes, oracle might not vanish, but it definitely needs some change.
By moralestapia 2025-12-1218:432 reply ???
None of those were in business since 1977 (w/ the exception of Nokia, which I would argue is still a successful company today. I wouldn't put it on that list).
None of those were ever valued (even close to) half a trillion, even adjusting for inflation.
By taylodl 2025-12-1514:12 Kodak was founded in 1892. I think Oracle is going to go the way of HP. Look at HP over the past 10 years and what it had been in the 10 year period leading up to that. Sure, HP is still a company with $50+ billion in revenue, which actually matches where Oracle is today, but they had been a company with $100+ billion in revenue - and that's before adjusting for inflation.
So while it's hard to call a company with $50+ billion in revenue a failure, they're not nearly what they once were. That's the direction I see Oracle going.
Your first point is correct, they are not that old. And while Nokia is still a company, it does not have the market power it once had. And that's what I meant with it might not vanish - Oracle will still be a company. Still, I think age is not really a good metric for success.
Your second point is right on the spot! Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth. As mentioned by some other commenters, Oracle has a lot of competition. Good competition. That's why I wrote it needs to change in order to stay competitive.
By moralestapia 2025-12-1219:51 >Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth.
Is this news to anyone in here?
It seems fitting. They destroyed Sun, destroyed Java, destroyed any developer or customer goodwill...and now they are destroying themselves.
By orochimaaru 2025-12-1217:47 Java is one thing they did right. Most enterprises are looking to move away from Oracle. I think there will be niche cases where rewrites don’t make sense. But for one of the big telecom providers I work for - the decision was made in 2020 to move off of Oracle. It’s not a flash cut but we’ve significantly reduced reliance. There are some critical apps that are still on it, but those are capped in maintenance mode until their replacements are ready.
Java is in the best shape it's ever been in. Jdk development and performance are through the roof and the developer experiences gets better with every release.
By davey48016 2025-12-1218:251 reply Java's in great shape now, but the period between when Oracle bought Sun (~2010) and about 2017 wasn't great, and there was a lot of concern about Java's future. I think most people who moved away from Java then haven't looked back.
I believe that is mostly due to Sun's stagnation and lack of funding. Oracle released Java 7 in 2011 and Java 8 in 2014, which is arguably the start of modernizing Java.
By 0cf8612b2e1e 2025-12-1218:561 reply I assumed it was Kotlin and/or Android. Oracle otherwise seemed fine to treat Java like IE6. It was only as alternatives (rise of Go, Rust, Clojure, etc) increasingly made the language look bad that really started to push development.
By vips7L 2025-12-1222:33 I don't think Oracle/OpenJdk really cares about Kotlin. It's usage is still minuscule compared to Java the language, and you're still using Java the platform by using it. I'm not sure they're really concerned about Rust either because it doesn't fill the same use cases. Go might be a concern, but who knows. I personally find Go the language to be worse then Java the language.
The idea that Java has been destroyed is pretty wild. I don't see how that belief could survive contact with the real world.
By bigmutant 2025-12-1219:08 Pretty common attitude from folks who have never worked in one of the BigTech companies where Java rules (Amazon being a prime example). Since they never encounter Java in the "SF-style Startup" world, they assume that it must be dead. Meanwhile hundreds-of-thousands of Engineers deal with hundreds-of-millions (billions?) of lines of Java every day
By collingreen 2025-12-1217:571 reply My assumption is the poster wants to imply Oracle destroyed the good will and interest for people to start new Java projects after the licensing changes and subsequent shakedown. Java clearly still runs all over the place and will for a while (although plenty of people trying to keep java but get away from oracle).
The Java goodwill is mostly gone and I see zero new orgs trying it so while Java is still alive and well the mindshare has definitely been squandered given the capability that Java has.
Java is one of the giants and there are tons of existing and new projects that use it. Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts. Look at QuestDB, or Netflix, as current examples of projects choosing Java.
The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN like Rust, Go, and OCaml are way down in a tier of languages that get a lot of blog posts but enjoy relatively little traction in reality.
> Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts.
It's very surprising to hear you say this, as it's so contrary to my experience.
From the smallest programs (Computer Language Benchmarks Game) to pretty big programs (web browsers), from low-level programs (OS kernels) to high-level programs (GUI Applications), from short-lived programs (command-line utilities) to long-lived programs (database servers), it's hard to think of a single segment where even average Java programs will out-perform average C, C++, or Rust programs.
I hadn't heard of QuestDB before, but it sounds like it's written in zero-GC Java using manual memory management. That's pretty unusual for Java, and would require a team of experts to pull off, I'd think. It also sounds like it drops to C++ and Rust for performance-critical tasks.
It's a statement of my experience in the performance achieved in practice by real developers who lack dedicated language support teams. And even the ones who enjoy dedicated language support teams. I could point to gRPC. gRPC-Java is slapping gRPC-C++ sideways. Why is that? Because when a codebase is increasingly complex, the C-style lifetime management becomes too difficult for developers to ponder, and they revert to relying on the slower features of the language platform, like reference counting smart pointers.
I think hybrid implementations, where a project enjoys the beneficial aspects of the language runtime at large, but delegates small, critical functions to other languages, makes sense. That keeps the C, C++, or Rust stuff contained to boundaries that are ponderable and doesn't let those language platforms dictate the overall architecture of the program.
By ahefner 2025-12-133:54 If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.
You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.
The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN are the ones the young people will just use by default.
Hotspot is the current choice for high performance programs, but is Rust lower performance in some way or are the only downsides related to its younger age?
It’s perhaps useful look at what languages brand new projects are being started with rather than just looking at what languages large established companies like Netflix are choosing.
By jeffbee 2025-12-1218:42 Rust is not inherently slower but then again neither are C and C++, but in practice all of those tend to be less efficient than realistic Java systems. Rust is displacing C in contexts where Rust's less than amazing performance are not noticeable in contrast to C's also-not-amazing level of performance. And I also think there is a cognitive bias under which a developer will reach for Rust to supplant a legacy C program, because that developer reflexively dislikes managed language runtimes.
By kakacik 2025-12-1218:40 Depends where you are, in startup world definitely yes. Elsewhere, not so much.
Companies couldn't care less about the underlying platform or language, they want reliability, stability and tons of easy to find people who can work with it from Day1. Java delivers all that, and will keep delivering for upcoming decades. Big businesses and big money love this (or hate the least out of IT stacks).
By ecshafer 2025-12-1218:28 The fact of the matter is that you read through a lot of these start up blogs on how they scaled X technology to some amazing number like 1000 users a day or whatever. But your average Java Spring app on Postgres is doing some far heavier workloads.
By TuxSH 2025-12-1220:21 Go is a bad example since it's ubiquitous in the Kubernetes world, in particular with k8s "operators" (for a variety of reasons)
By stronglikedan 2025-12-1218:061 reply new orgs chase the shiny new things. nothing new there
By dangus 2025-12-1218:29 And then those new orgs become established orgs and some old orgs decline.
It’s not even really a “chase,” it’s a question of “if I’m building something new, what am I choosing?”
Eventually that momentum can turn into the old thing being worth actively removing.
By snarf21 2025-12-1218:58 To be fair, Oracle acquired Java (via Sun) specifically so they could sue Google for billions. They may not have killed Java but it wasn't altruism.
By vkou 2025-12-1218:25 Java's not gone anywhere, but it's been years since I've interviewed anyone who has made it their language of choice. Developer sentiment for it isn't exactly great.
A decade ago, a good ~80% of applicants chose to use it or C#.
I personally don't have any issues with working with it, but nobody's learning it outside of work.
On the other hand, it is quite easy to learn, so there's that going for it.
More like a zombie. It is still shuffling along, but the life left it long ago.
By swarnie 2025-12-1219:40 I'm going to take this as the HN effect, if something isn't doing 500% a year its dead.
By wiseowise 2025-12-1218:34 Destroyed Java? What are you even on, lol? Oracle resurrected Java.
By koolba 2025-12-1220:32 If I'm reading the chart correctly, the current stock price of ORCL is 15% below the price before they announced the OpenAI deal in September. 40% down from the peak is one thing, but I see the net v.s. before the craziness as a better indicator of what's going on.
