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1.	Oracle Burned $10 Billion as AI Investments Rise, Shares Fall 11% By Anissa Gardizy and Amir Efrati Source: The Information

Oracle shares fell more than 11% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the database and cloud firm said it burned roughly $10 billion in the November quarter due to spending on data centers for artificial intelligence customers such as OpenAI. The cash burn, unprecedented in Oracle's history, has prompted the firm to borrow heavily for such projects, including an $18 billion bond offering in September.

Executives said Wednesday that capital expenditures would hit $50 billion in the fiscal year ending in May 2026, up $15 billion from the fiscal-year capex projection it provided three months ago. Bankers and infrastructure lenders have grown wary of the amount of debt tied to Oracle's data center projects. Co-CEO Clay Magouryk said that while analysts had estimated Oracle would need $100 billion to complete its data center plans, "we expect we will need less if not substantially less…than that amount to go fund this buildout."

In any case, the company says the investment is worth it. The increased capex in the current fiscal year will result in $4 billion of extra revenue in the following fiscal year, CFO Doug Kehring said. Oracle reported $523 billion worth of signed contracts as of the end of November, up $68 billion from three months earlier thanks to new cloud-server rental deals with Meta Platforms and Nvidia, whose chips Oracle buys for AI data centers. The question is whether OpenAI and other customers will be able to pay those amounts, and whether Oracle can set up complex facilities for such customers on time. Oracle has projected cloud revenue of $166 billion in its fiscal 2030.

Since Oracle announced large contracts with OpenAI and others, which boosted its stock to record levels, shares have fallen 30% on concerns that the future won't play out the way Oracle has projected. Oracle has a market capitalization of more than $600 billion.

Oracle recently tried to reassure investors that as revenue surges in the years ahead, its business of renting out servers packed with Nvidia chips will become far more profitable than it currently is. The Information has reported on Oracle's recent struggles to generate high gross profit margins from renting out Nvidia chips.

In the November quarter, Oracle reported 14% revenue growth compared to the same period a year earlier. Its cloud-server rental revenue rose 68% year-over–year to $4.1 billion, and Kehring implied that such revenue growth would accelerate in the current fiscal quarter. The November figures means Oracle's cloud business about a tenth of the size of Amazon Web Services'.

2.	Trump Says Warner Bros Deal Should Include CNN By Sylvia Varnham O'Regan Source: Bloomberg

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he thought the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery should include CNN, potentially complicating things for Netflix, which has reached a deal to buy WBD's studio and streaming operations but not its cable channels such as CNN. Trump's preference for a sale of the whole company is good news for the Ellison family controlled Paramount Skydance Corp, which has mounted a competing offer to buy WBD entirely.

In a meeting with business leaders Wednesday, which was reported by Bloomberg, Trump said, "I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately." He added: "I don't think the people that are running that company right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don't think that should be allowed to continue. I think CNN should be sold along with everything else."

Trump has complained repeatedly about CNN over the years, but the comments stand out as unusual given the high-stakes nature of the deal. According to the Wall Street Journal, Paramount CEO David Ellison told Trump he would make significant changes at CNN. The president has also talked with Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos about the deal, Bloomberg reported. Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, is close with Trump. Still, Trump has yet to publicly weigh in on which offer he favors. He has indicated that he will probably be involved.

3.	Pinterest Saving 90% on AI Models Through Open Source, Ready Says By Martin Peers Source: The Information

Pinterest has saved 90% of the cost of using brand-name AI by relying on open source models, according to Pinterest CEO Bill Ready.

Speaking in an interview on The Information's TITV, Ready said open source AI models were competitive with closed-source models developed by big tech companies at "really effective cost to performance levels."

He said in his discussions with other CEOs, he had heard complaints that companies weren't getting "the return on investment that they need, and they spending a lot" on "off the shelf proprietary software solutions." He added that companies were "finding that they can leverage open source to get much better efficiency."

4.	Oracle Says Its AI Cloud Customers Might Bring Their Own Server Chips By Anissa Gardizy Source: The Information

Oracle Chief Financial Officer Doug Kehring said Wednesday that the database and cloud firm was exploring unusual ways to lower its spending on data centers for artificial intelligence.

Kehring said that in addition to tapping public and private debt markets, Oracle may let customers bring their own AI server chips to Oracle's data centers and that some chip suppliers may lease the hardware that ends up in Oracle data centers. Both scenarios are unprecedented in the cloud industry, as cloud providers usually purchase server chips and other hardware that they rent out to customers.

"[A]s you can imagine," Kehring said, these different business models would improve Oracle's ability to generate profits and reduce its borrowing needs, which have weighed on the stock despite the company's big promises of future revenue from AI customers such as OpenAI.

The Information first reported that OpenAI was in talks to lease Nvidia chips rather than buy them outright. It's not clear whether those talks were related to the Oracle facilities in Texas that OpenAI plans to use.

Kehring didn't elaborate on how the potential new business models for Oracle's AI data centers would improve its profit margins. Oracle recently has struggled to generate strong margins from renting out Nvidia server chips.

5.	Google Announces AI Partnerships Pilot with News Publishers By Erin Woo Source: The Information

Google has struck pilot partnerships with some news publishers allowing the tech giant to get expanded access to the publishers' content for testing of new experimental AI features, Google announced on Wednesday.

The deals, with news publishers across the world including The Washington Post, Der Spiegel and The Guardian, will result in new features in Google News, including AI-generated article overviews on the publications' Google News pages—before users click through to the link—and audio briefings. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the commercial terms of the partnership.

The announcement comes amid heightened tension between Google and news publishers, which blame Google among other AI chatbot providers for falling web traffic. The deals announced with news publishers on Wednesday fall short of what publishers have been increasingly calling for: payment for inclusion in AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, which publishers say uses their content while hurting their traffic and thus businesses.

As part of Wednesday's blog post, Google did announce an expanded set of newswire partnerships, adding Estadão, Antara and Yonhap to their existing deal with the Associated Press to supply "real-time information" for the Gemini app.

Also on Wednesday, Google announced new feature updates to how news is displayed on Google, including the global expansion of a "Preferred Sources" program that lets Search users see more links from news outlets they select. Google is also adding a feature in Gemini highlighting links from users' news subscriptions, and increasing the number of inline links in AI Mode.

6.	Andreessen Horowitz Opens First Office in Asia By Yueqi Yang Source: The Information

Andreessen Horowitz is opening its first office in Asia, located in Seoul, as it expands its crypto arm in the region.

A16z crypto said it has hired Sungmo Park, formerly with Monad Foundation and Polygon Labs, as its first staffer based in Asia, leading its Seoul office. Park will be the head of APAC go-to-market, a sales role which will focus on helping a16z's crypto portfolio companies build partnerships and grow users in Asia. The team plans to hire more staff in Asia.

Korea is the second-largest crypto market, according to an a16z report. Park isn't an investor and the firm doesn't have near-term plans to hire investors there. Still, a16z crypto has invested in Asia-based crypto startups, including Story and Sky Mavis.

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