Burry Says Oracle Has $288 Billion in Leases It Has Not Started Paying

Michael Burry has put a number on what he thinks Big Tech's accounts are not showing: $288 billion in leases at Oracle that the company has not started paying.

His argument is narrow and, for that reason, hard to wave away. Company filings are signed by chief executives under oath, and lying on them is a crime. Burry is not saying anyone lied. He is saying the disclosure rules do not require the thing an investor most needs to know.

Revenue that circulates

The second half of the case concerns where AI demand comes from. Filings do not break out how much of it is companies buying each other's products — model developers buying compute, chipmakers taking stakes in their own customers, cloud providers booking revenue from firms they have funded.

Oracle's reported 121pc growth figure includes revenue of that type, without disclosing how much. A growth rate assembled partly from money moving in a circle is a different asset from one assembled from outside demand, and the filing does not let a reader tell them apart.

The arithmetic that frames it

Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Oracle together earned about $400 billion in profit last year. Against the spending those same five have committed to, that is a fraction.

Why it reaches Addis Abeba

Ethiopian founders raise from funds whose returns, and whose willingness to write cheques into frontier markets, are set by how the US technology cycle turns. A capital-expenditure correction in AI infrastructure would not touch an Addis Abeba fintech directly. It would touch the fund that was going to lead its next round.

Open

Oracle has not responded to the characterisation of its lease obligations. Burry has not published the workings behind the $288 billion figure, and the disclosure standard he is implicitly asking for does not currently exist.

Sources: Venture Capital, 20 September 2026