Oracle shares tumbled 12% on Thursday as surging spending and a ballooning debt load fanned investor concerns about the cash burn in ‌the company's push to build out AI infrastructure. A smaller player in ​the cloud-computing industry for a long time, Oracle has in recent months seized massive data-center deals with OpenAI and Meta to compete more forcefully with rivals, such as Amazon and Microsoft. But Oracle lacks the large cash flows that have primarily funded the tech giants' outlays, forcing it to burn cash and sell debt instruments ‌at a time its traditional software ⁠business is under pressure from the very AI tools it plans to support through its cloud.