Oracle’s share price plummeted 10 percent on Wednesday after its quarterly revenue fell short of expectations.

Larry Ellison’s firm, which has become a key player in the AI data center ecosystem thanks to deals with the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft, brought in $16.06 billion in the three months to the end of November, slightly down on the $16.2 billion predicted by Wall Street analysts.

It is a far cry from the company’s last quarterly results, released in September, when news of a series of AI deals boosted its bottom line and saw its share price soar 40 percent, briefly making founder and CTO Ellison the world’s richest man.

Since then, questions have been raised over how Oracle will fulfil some of these contracts, and the amount of debt the firm needs to take on to pay for the data center capacity its customers are demanding. Analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets said in September that Big Red may need to borrow up to $100 billion over four years to meet its commitments to OpenAI, for whom it is providing much of the infrastructure underpinning the Stargate digital infrastructure project.

Oracle’s quarterly results were, by most standards, pretty impressive, with revenue up 14 percent Year-on-Year (YoY), and income from its cloud unit Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which covers its AI services, growing 34 percent, to $7.97 billion. The fact that these numbers led to its share price dropping so markedly illustrates the difficulty AI infrastructure companies may have meeting heightened market expectations, which have swelled the values of many businesses in the sector over the last year.

Capex for the quarter was $12 billion, with Oracle SVP Ken Bond telling investors on the company’s earnings call that most of this went on “revenue-generating equipment that is going into our data centers.”

CEO Clay Magouyrk said OCI had handed over 400MW of data center capacity to customers during the quarter, and that it delivered 50 percent more GPU capacity to clients than it did in the previous quarter. Full-year capex expectations have also been raised by $15bn, up from the estimated $35bn from the previous quarter.

Magouyrk addressed fears around Oracle’s growing debt, claiming that he does not believe his firm will need to borrow $100 billion to fund its data center plans. He told analysts: “We've read quite a few reports that show an expectation of upwards of $100 billion needed for Oracle to go out and complete this build-out. Based on what we see right now, we expect we will need less, if not substantially less, money than that amount.”

He said Oracle had been investigating a range of financing models for data centers, including customers bringing their own chips, and renting - rather than buying - GPUs from companies such as Nvidia and AMD, to reduce the required capital expenditure. “We're committed to maintaining our investment-grade debt rating,” Magouyrk said.

Remaining performance obligations at Oracle - contracts signed with customers but not yet delivered or paid for - total $523 billion, up 438 percent YoY.