Oracle may need to source as much as $100 billion in debt funding over the next four years to fund its contract with OpenAI, according to analysts.

KeyBanc Capital Markets has estimated that the company could require as much as $25bn per year to help it build the cloud compute infrastructure needed for its deal with OpenAI, signed earlier this month, as per a report from the Wall Street Journal.

The deal in question is a $300bn contract, reportedly signed earlier this month, that would span five years and start in 2027.

This would make the deal one of the largest cloud computing contracts in history. It follows a July announcement that OpenAI was sourcing 4.5GW of data center capacity from Oracle at a cost of $30bn a year starting in 2028. The reported value of the new contract means this yearly cost would double to $60bn. It is not obvious why such a steep increase is necessary, though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said he expects the company to spend "trillions" on infrastructure.

The deal came to light just after Oracle announced its Q1 FY2026 earnings results, during which CEO Safra Catz said the firm had signed “significant cloud contracts with the who's who of AI," including three multi-billion dollar contracts inked in the first quarter of 2025. Additionally, Catz said that the company now had $455bn in remaining performance obligations.

Analysts from KeyBanc have speculated that, as it stands, Oracle doesn't currently have the capital to build out the extent of infrastructure such a contract would entail. Oracle had around $82.2bn in long-term debt as of the end of August, and earlier this month, Big Red sold a series of bonds to raise $18bn.

In the Q1 FY2026 earnings statement, the company noted it had around $10bn in cash and equivalents, and $9bn in debt due in the next 12 months.

Notably, however, the company was already significantly ramping up its investment in infrastructure build-out. That quarter alone saw $8.5bn in capex, up year on year from $2.3bn. The $300bn contract will only see this escalate. Speaking on capex at the time, Catz said that Oracle was expecting capex for FY2026 to be around $35bn, though it could be a little higher, which is "good news because it means more capacity has been handed over."

Beyond the funding that Oracle will need for the buildout, it is worth noting that OpenAI itself will be reliant on raising capital to pay for the deal in the first place.

While OpenAI is seeing its revenue grow, it is still nowhere in the realm of what would be necessary to fund a $300bn contract. As per a report from The Information, the AI startup saw revenues of $4.3bn in the first half of this fiscal year, a 16 percent increase on the total revenue for the previous year.

OpenAI is investing heavily in capacity outside of Oracle, as well. Last week, the company expanded its contract with CoreWeave by a further $6.5bn - bringing its total to $22.4bn with the neocloud.

OpenAI also has a long-term relationship with Microsoft and has begun to use Google Cloud. Earlier this month, the company said it would spend some $100bn over the next five years, just on renting backup servers from cloud providers for periods of peak demand.

It has also signed a letter of intent with Nvidia to deploy at least 10GW of the company's systems in its data centers, which in return will see Nvidia invest up to $100bn in OpenAI as the new systems are deployed.

To date, OpenAI has not turned a profit.