Larry Ellison Redefines AI Leadership in 2025 With Massive Stargate Push

Oracle Corp., led by co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison, emerged as the defining force in artificial intelligence for 2025, according to Bloomberg assessments, outshining prominent figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in shaping the trajectory of AI advancement. Despite Musk holding the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth of $631 billion, Ellison's strategic moves positioned Oracle as a central player in the AI infrastructure boom. His personal wealth surged by nearly $60 billion over the year, reaching approximately $252 billion and ranking fourth globally, fueled primarily by Oracle's stock performance amid explosive demand for AI cloud services and massive contracts.

A pivotal achievement was Ellison's key role in the Stargate project, a landmark $500 billion initiative to construct vast AI data centers across the United States. Announced on January 21, 2025, at the White House alongside President Donald Trump, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, the venture—jointly involving OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and others—aims to build up to 10 gigawatts of capacity by 2029, creating an estimated 100,000 jobs and securing U.S. leadership in AI. Oracle has been instrumental in developing major sites, including expansions in Abilene, Texas, and partnerships adding 4.5 gigawatts of capacity, with additional announcements throughout the year pushing total planned investment toward hundreds of billions.

Oracle solidified its AI dominance through a landmark multi-year deal with OpenAI valued at over $300 billion, making the ChatGPT developer its largest customer for computing power and cloud infrastructure. This partnership, combined with aggressive growth in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure optimized for AI workloads, drove strong quarterly earnings and a remarkable 40% single-day stock surge in September 2025—the largest one-day wealth gain recorded by Bloomberg for any billionaire. These developments highlighted Oracle's shift from traditional enterprise software to becoming a backbone of the global AI ecosystem, even as the company navigated challenges like increased capital expenditure and debt to support rapid data center build-outs.

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As 2025 concludes, Ellison's influence extends beyond technology into media and broader investments, including financing for his son David's Skydance Media acquisitions. While Oracle's heavy reliance on AI commitments carries risks amid market volatility, the year's events underscore how Ellison and Oracle redefined the AI landscape, transforming infrastructure scale into a national strategic priority and proving that behind-the-scenes cloud powerhouses could dictate the future of the technology more than consumer-facing innovations alone.

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