As Anxiety Grows Over AI Big Bets, Software Giant Loses 34 Trillion Won in Market Cap in One Day

Shares of major U.S. software company Oracle Corp. (ORCL) plunged 6.95% on the New York Stock Exchange on February 4, closing at $136.49, with trading volume surging to 23.03 million shares. The one-day decline wiped about $25.5 billion off Oracle’s market capitalization—shrinking it from roughly $392.2 billion, the equivalent of nearly ₩34 trillion.

Since the beginning of the year, Oracle’s stock has fallen more than 10%, weighed down by heavy capital expenditures and rising debt concerns linked to its AI data-center investments, as well as a series of Wall Street analysts cutting their price targets. Some analysts have even speculated that Oracle may undertake workforce reductions involving tens of thousands of employees and consider asset sales.

As a result of the broader software-sector downturn, co-founder Larry Ellison’s net worth has declined by approximately $49 billion—about ₩66 trillion—so far this year.

Oracle, which started as an enterprise-software provider specializing in databases and ERP, is transforming into a cloud and AI infrastructure company led by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It has secured major multi-cloud and AI-infrastructure agreements with partners including OpenAI and NVIDIA.

Having posted more than $57 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025, Oracle has set ambitious fiscal 2026 targets: $18 billion in cloud-infrastructure revenue (roughly ₩24 trillion) and over $455 billion in Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO), underscoring its plan to capture AI demand over the coming years.