Oracle (ORCL, Financial) is stepping deeper into Europe's AI arms race. The company just announced a $3 billion investment over the next five years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Germany and the Netherlands. $2 billion will be poured into the Frankfurt region, beefing up Oracle's cloud backbone and AI capabilities. Another $1 billion is headed to the Netherlands to boost infrastructure in Amsterdam. Oracle says this could help it serve more public and private sector clients that are shifting workloads to the cloud—and looking to AI to cut repetitive work.
This move adds Oracle to the fast-growing club of U.S. giants deploying serious capital across Europe. Microsoft (MSFT, Financial) plans to spend about $4.75 billion in Italy on cloud and AI. Amazon (AMZN, Financial) has mapped out a €17.8 billion ($20.77 billion) commitment to Germany through 2040—and another €15.7 billion earmarked for Spain's cloud ecosystem. Meanwhile, Brookfield Asset Management (BAM, Financial) is backing a nearly $10 billion AI data center project in Sweden. Everyone's placing their chips—and Europe's digital infrastructure is the table.
Why now? It's a mix of regulation, rising demand, and regional pressure to localize AI infrastructure. Oracle's bet suggests the company sees AI and cloud migration in Europe not as a trend, but a long runway. With hyperscalers racing to build out next-gen capacity, this wave of investment could reshape not just Oracle's European footprint—but who controls the pipes powering the next decade of enterprise AI.
