Races Are Won in Corners
When a corner appears in business, you gun it or watch others pass. Oracle missed the cloud corner and spent a decade stuck in fifth place. They're betting $300 billion they won't miss the AI corner.
Formula 1 races are an incredible spectacle. Cars streak past at 200 miles per hour, their engines screaming, aerodynamics optimized to the millimeter. For hours, they follow each other around the track—jockeying for position, looking for opportunities, but mostly maintaining formation. The straight sections blur by. Then you enter a corner.
Everything happens at once. Brakes engage with violent force. In those few seconds, the entire race can change. A driver who’s been following for an hour suddenly dives inside, claims the apex, and emerges ahead. The race resets. Now everyone else has to wait for the next corner—the next moment when the order can change.
This is where races are won. On the straights, aerodynamics lock cars in formation. The car in front controls the clean air; the car behind fights turbulence and loses grip. The gap might as well be miles.
But corners break that formation. Under braking, the aerodynamic advantage disappears. What matters isn’t raw speed anymore—it’s judgment about when to brake, nerve about how late you can wait, commitment to a line that might not work. In those few seconds, different choices create different outcomes. The order resets.
This is where nerve matters more than horsepower. Where timing beats top speed. Where the race actually happens.
But Corners Kill
Not every driver who guns it makes the corner. Push too hard and you crash. Brake too late and you slide off track. Every season, corners eliminate drivers who were too aggressive—or not aggressive enough.
Corners are where you can change position. They’re also where you can crash out completely. Every F1 driver knows this. They gun it anyway—because the alternative is following the car ahead for the entire race, maintaining your careful, safe position until the checkered flag drops and you finish behind.
The choice isn’t between safe and risky. It’s between certain irrelevance and a shot at winning.
Watching the Corner Arrive
I’ve been watching this same choice play out in tech for the past year. Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon—they’re collectively committing over $380 billion to AI infrastructure in 2025. Not $380 million. $380 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg told investors he’s “reminding them about the risk of not investing enough.” Microsoft and Meta CEOs defended the spending as “crucial to staying competitive.” The tone in every earnings call is the same: not excitement about opportunities, but something closer to obligation. They’re spending like their hands are tied.
That’s what made me think about F1 corners. When a corner appears, you don’t debate. You gun it or you fall behind. To understand why tech companies have no choice right now, we need to look at what happened to the last company that hesitated at a corner.
The First Corner
In 2006, Oracle dominated enterprise software. The company had built its empire on database technology—the foundation that powered SAP, Salesforce, and much of corporate America. Oracle was the incumbent. The leader.
Then the corner arrived.
In March, Amazon launched AWS with two services: S3 for storage and EC2 for computing capacity. The cloud computing corner had appeared, and AWS took the inside line.
The other technology companies saw it. Google launched its cloud platform in 2008, initially called App Engine. Microsoft announced Azure in October 2008, launching it commercially in 2010. Both poured billions into data center capacity, racing to close the gap.
By 2015, the positions were solidifying. AWS held the lead at 31% market share. Microsoft and Google were far behind, battling for second and third. Network effects and first-mover advantages made it hard to change positions. The corner had decided the order.
Oracle didn’t even enter. The company that dominated enterprise databases watched from the sidelines while cloud computing redefined the infrastructure market. They finally launched their cloud platform in September 2016—a decade after the corner appeared.
Ten years is everything in a market where being first matters. By the time Oracle entered, they captured only 3% market share, landing in fifth place. They couldn’t catch up on the straight. The rules rewarded the companies that got there first.
Oracle’s story isn’t about a bad decision. It’s about what happens when you don’t make a decision fast enough. They spent a decade trying to catch up on the straight. The gap never closed.
Then Everything Changed
In 2023, AI infrastructure demands started reshaping what cloud computing meant. Not general-purpose web servers optimized for HTTP requests, but massive compute fabrics for training models. Not database queries, but tensor operations across thousands of GPUs connected with high-bandwidth interconnects. The rules—what mattered, what worked, what customers valued—were shifting.
New players saw the opportunity. CoreWeave captured an estimated double-digit share of AI compute by specializing early in GPU infrastructure. Lambda Labs and Crusoe Energy built AI-focused platforms from scratch. These weren’t the established hyperscalers Oracle had been slowly losing to. These were startups defining entirely new playbooks for AI-native infrastructure.
Oracle was sitting in fifth place in traditional cloud computing, watching the market shift again. Miss this corner, and they wouldn’t just stay in fifth. They’d be sixth, seventh, watching the race disappear ahead while newcomers claimed the positions Oracle would never reach.
The expertise that made AWS, Microsoft, and Google dominant in traditional cloud computing—years perfecting web workloads, building specialized teams, hardening systems for HTTP traffic—was suddenly less relevant. This is what Clayton Christensen documented in The Innovator’s Dilemma: the very management practices that made companies dominant in one paradigm prevent them from winning the next one.
The $300 Billion Bet
On September 10, 2025, Oracle committed $300 billion to OpenAI over five years. Sixty billion dollars per year—more than Oracle’s entire current annual revenue of $59 billion. Analysts project Oracle’s capital expenditure could reach $80 billion by 2029 to support the infrastructure, up from $35 billion this year.
The market applauded the move. Oracle’s stock surged 36% in a single day—the biggest one-day gain in the company’s history. Larry Ellison briefly became the richest person in the world. Here was a company that recognized the corner and committed everything to making it.
But gunning it doesn’t guarantee you make the corner. Push too hard and you crash. Brake too late and you slide off track. The $300 billion might fail. The execution might crash.
Over the following two months, the markets seemed to notice just how much Oracle was betting on this turn. The stock dropped more than 40%, shedding $315 billion in market value. Analysts questioned the economics. The debt levels looked dangerous. The execution risk seemed enormous.
But Oracle already knows what the alternative looks like—they lived it for a decade after missing the cloud corner. Fifth place. Three percent market share. Watching others compete for the podium while you fight to stay relevant.
The volatility isn’t evidence of a bad decision. It’s evidence of maximum uncertainty—which is exactly what corners create. You can’t know who will win until the corner is over. By then, the positions are set and the race continues on the next straight.
What Corners Demand
Formula 1 drivers don’t wait for certainty before committing to a corner. They can’t. The moment when you can change position is measured in seconds. Wait to see how it turns out, and you’ve already lost.
Business corners work the same way. The traditional cloud computing market was won between 2006 and 2016. By the time it was clear who dominated, the positions were locked in. Network effects and ecosystem lock-in made it nearly impossible for late entrants to catch up. Oracle learned this the hard way, spending a decade stuck in fifth place.
The AI infrastructure corner is happening now. Look at the numbers. Meta spending $60-65 billion. Microsoft $80-100 billion. Google $85-93 billion. Amazon matching them. Every major tech company sees the same corner and knows the Oracle lesson: hesitate and you’re done.
This collective acceleration creates bubbles. When everyone’s hands are tied by the same imperative—gun it or become irrelevant—they all commit massive capital simultaneously. Overcapacity becomes inevitable. Write-downs will follow. Not everyone will win. Some will nail the apex. Others will crash.
Data centers will get built that won’t be needed. Electricity will be consumed at scale for infrastructure that sits idle. The individually rational choice creates collectively wasteful outcomes—but that doesn’t make the individual choice any less rational.
But the bubble isn’t irrational exuberance. It’s rational compulsion. These companies don’t have a choice. The one certain outcome is that NOT gunning it guarantees you become Oracle—spending the next decade stuck in fifth place, watching the race happen ahead of you, your position locked in because you were too cautious when it mattered.
In five years, we’ll know which companies positioned themselves correctly and which ones missed the turn. Some will have crashed trying to make the corner. Others will have nailed it. But that knowledge will be useless. The positions will be set. The race will have moved to the next straight.
You gun it or you watch others pass.