A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed the video site has added payouts for creators in PayPal’s stablecoin but declined to comment further.

YouTube is already an existing customer of PayPal’s and uses the fintech giant’s payouts service, which helps large enterprises pay gig workers and contractors. 

Early in the third quarter, PayPal added the capability for payment recipients to receive their checks in PayPal’s stablecoin, PYUSD. Afterwards, YouTube decided to give that option to creators, who receive a share of earnings from the content they post on the platform, said Zabaneh.

“The beauty of what we’ve built is that YouTube doesn’t have to touch crypto and so we can help take away that complexity,” she added.

Big Tech eyes stablecoins

YouTube’s interest in stablecoins comes as Google and other Big Tech companies have shown interest in the cryptocurrencies amid a wave of hype in Silicon Valley and beyond. 

The tokens, which are pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar, are longtime features of the crypto industry. But over the past year, they’ve exploded into the mainstream, especially after President Donald Trump signed into law a new bill regulating the crypto assets. Proponents say they are an upgrade over existing financial infrastructure, and big fintechs have taken notice, including Stripe. In February, the payments giant closed a blockbuster $1.1 billion purchase of the stablecoin startup Bridge.

PayPal has long been an earlier mover in crypto among large tech firms. In 2020, it let users buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a handful of other cryptocurrencies. And, in 2023, it launched the PYSUD stablecoin, which now has a market capitalization of nearly $4 billion, according to CoinGecko.

PayPal has slowly integrated PYUSD throughout its stable of products. Users can hold it in its digital wallet as well as Venmo, another financial app that PayPal also owns. They can use it to pay merchants. And, in February, a PayPal executive said small-to-medium sized merchants will be able to use it to pay vendors.

YouTube’s addition of payouts in PYUSD isn’t the first time Google has experimented with PayPal’s stablecoin. An executive at Google Cloud, the tech giant’s cloud computing arm, previously toldFortune that it had received payments from two of its customers in PYUSD. 

Capital expenditures, a metric of data center spending, were about $12 billion in the quarter, an increase from $8.5 billion in the preceding period, the company said Wednesday in a statement. Analysts anticipated $8.25 billion in capital spending in the quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. 

Oracle now expects capital expenditures will reach about $50 billion in the fiscal year ending in May 2026 — a $15 billion increase from its September forecast — executives said on a conference call after the results were released.

The shares fell 11% to $198.85 at the close Thursday in New York, the biggest single-day decline since Jan. 27. Oracle’s stock had already lost about a third of its value through Wednesday’s close since a record high on Sept. 10. Meanwhile, a measure of Oracle’s credit risk reached a fresh 16-year high.

The latest earning report and share slide marks a reversal of fortunes for a company that just a few months ago was enjoying a blistering rally and clinching multibillion-dollar data center deals with the likes of OpenAI. The gains temporarily turned co-founder Larry Ellison into the world’s richest person, with the tech magnate passing Elon Musk for a few hours.

Known for its database software, Oracle has recently found success in the competitive cloud computing market. It’s engaging in a massive data center build-out to power AI work for OpenAI and also counts companies such as ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Meta Platforms Inc. as major cloud customers. 

Fiscal second-quarter cloud sales increased 34% to $7.98 billion, while revenue in the company’s closely watched infrastructure business gained 68% to $4.08 billion. Both numbers fell just short of analysts’ estimates.Play Video

Still, Wall Street has raised doubts about the costs and time required to develop AI infrastructure at such a massive scale. Oracle has taken out significant sums of debt and committed to leasing multiple data center sites. 

The cost of protecting the company’s debt against default for five years rose as much as 0.17 percentage point to around 1.41 percentage point a year, the highest intraday level since April 2009, according to ICE Data Services. The gauge rises as investor confidence in the company’s credit quality falls. Oracle credit derivatives have become a credit market barometer for AI risk.

“Oracle faces its own mounting scrutiny over a debt-fueled data center build-out and concentration risk amid questions over the outcome of AI spending uncertainty,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer. “This revenue miss will likely exacerbate concerns among already cautious investors about its OpenAI deal and its aggressive AI spending.”

Remaining performance obligation, a measure of bookings, jumped more than fivefold to $523 billion in the quarter, which ended Nov. 30. Analysts, on average, estimated $519 billion.

Investors want to see Oracle turn its higher spending on infrastructure into revenue as quickly as it has promised. 

“The vast majority of our cap ex investments are for revenue generating equipment that is going into our data centers and not for land, buildings or power that collectively are covered via leases,” Principal Financial Officer Doug Kehring said on the call. “Oracle does not pay for these leases until the completed data centers and accompanying utilities are delivered to us.”

“As a foundational principle, we expect and are committed to maintaining our investment grade debt rating,” Kehring added.

Oracle’s cash burn increased in the quarter and its free cash flow reached a negative $10 billion. Overall, the company has about $106 billion in debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “Investors continually seem to expect incremental cap ex to drive incremental revenue faster than the current reality,” wrote Mark Murphy, an analyst at JP Morgan.Play Video

“Oracle is very good at building and running high-performance and cost-efficient cloud data centers,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two chief executive officers, said in the statement. “Because our data centers are highly automated, we can build and run more of them.”

This is Oracle’s first earnings report since longtime Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz was succeeded by Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, who are sharing the CEO post.

Part of the negative sentiment from investors in recent weeks is tied to increased skepticism about the business prospects of OpenAI, which is seeing more competition from companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google, wrote Kirk Materne, an analyst at Evercore ISI, in a note ahead of earnings. Investors would like to see Oracle management explain how they could adjust spending plans if demand from OpenAI changes, he added.

In the quarter, total revenue expanded 14% to $16.1 billion. The company’s cloud software application business rose 11% to $3.9 billion. This is the first quarter that Oracle’s cloud infrastructure unit generated more sales than the applications business.

Earnings, excluding some items, were $2.26 a share. The profit was helped by the sale of Oracle’s holdings in chipmaker Ampere Computing, the company said. That generated a pretax gain of $2.7 billion in the period. Ampere, which was backed early in its life by Oracle, was bought by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. in a transaction that closed last month.

In the current period, which ends in February, total revenue will increase 19% to 22%, while cloud sales will increase 40% to 44%, Kehring said on the call. Both forecasts were in line with analysts’ estimates.

Annual revenue will be $67 billion, affirming an outlook the company gave in October.

Nicholas Grous, director of research for consumer internet and fintech at Ark Invest, told Fortune tools like Sora effectively recreate the “YouTube moment” for video production, handing professional‑grade creation capabilities to anyone with a prompt instead of a studio budget. In his view, that shift will flood the market with AI‑generated clips and series, making it far harder for any single new creator or franchise to break out than it was in the early social‑video era.​ His remarks echoed the analysis from Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha, who recently told Fortune Netflix’s big move for Warner Bros.’ reveals the streaming giant is motivated by a need to deepen its war chest as it sees Google’s AI-video capabilities exploding with the onset of TPU chips.

As low‑cost synthetic video proliferates, Grous said he believes audiences will begin to mentally divide entertainment into “pre‑AI” and “post‑AI” categories, attaching a premium to work made largely by humans before generative tools became ubiquitous. “I think you’re going to have basically a split between pre-AI content and post-AI content,” adding that viewers will consider pre-AI content closer to “true art, that was made with just human ingenuity and creativity, not this AI slop, for lack of a better word.”

Disney’s IP as AI fuel

Within that framework, Grous argued Disney’s real advantage is not just Sora access, but the depth of its pre‑AI catalog across animation, live‑action films, and television. Iconic franchises like Star Wars, classic princess films and legacy animated characters become building blocks for a global experiment in AI‑assisted storytelling, with fans effectively test‑marketing new scenarios at scale.​

“I actually think, and this might be counterintuitive, that the pre-AI content that existed, the Harry Potter, the Star Wars, all of the content that we’ve grown up with … that actually becomes incrementally more valuable to the entertainment landscape,” Grous said. On the one hand, he said, there are deals like Disney and OpenAI’s where IP can become user-generated content, but on the other, IP represents a robust content pipeline for future shows, movies, and the like.

Grous sketched a feedback loop in which Disney can watch what AI‑generated character combinations or story setups resonate online, then selectively “pull up” the most promising concepts into professionally produced, higher‑budget projects for Disney+ or theatrical release. From Disney’s perspective, he added, “we didn’t know Cinderella walking down Broadway and interacting with these types of characters, whatever it may be, was something that our audience would be interested in.” The OpenAI deal is exciting because Disney can bring that content onto its streaming arm Disney+ and make it more premium. “We’re going to use our studio chops to build this into something that’s a bit more luxury than what just an individual can create.”

Grous agreed the emerging market for pre‑AI film and TV libraries is similar to what’s happened in the music business, where legacy catalogs from artists like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan have fetched huge sums from buyers betting on long‑term streaming and licensing value.

The big Netflix-Warner deal

For streaming rivals, the Disney-OpenAI pact is a strategic warning shot. Grous argued the soaring price tags in the bidding war for Warner Bros. between Netflix and Paramount shows the importance of IP for the next phase of entertainment. “​I think the reason this bidding [for Warner Bros.] is approaching $100 billion-plus is the content library and the potential to do a Disney-OpenAI type of deal.” In other words, whoever controls Batman and the like will control the inevitable AI-generated versions of those characters, although “they could take a franchise like Harry Potter and then just create slop around it.”

Netflix has a great track record on monetizing libraries, Grous said, listing the example of how the defunct USA dramedy Suits surged in popularity once it landed on Netflix, proving extensive back catalogs can be revived and re‑monetized when matched with modern distribution.​

Grous cited Nintendo and Pokémon as examples of under‑monetized franchises that could see similar upside if their owners strike Sora‑style deals to bring characters more deeply into mobile and social environments.​ “That’s another company where you go, ‘Oh my god, the franchises they have, if they’re able to bring it into this new age that we’re all experiencing, this is a home-run opportunity.’”

In that environment, the Ark analyst suggests Disney’s OpenAI deal is less of a one‑off licensing win than an early template for how legacy media owners might survive and thrive in an AI‑saturated market. The companies with rich pre‑AI catalogs and a willingness to experiment with new tools, he argued, will be best positioned to stand out amid the “AI slop” and turn nostalgia‑laden IP into enduring, flexible assets for the post‑AI age.​

Underlying all of this is a broader battle for attention that spans far beyond traditional studios and shows how sectors between tech and entertainment are getting even blurrier than when the gatecrashers from Silicon Valley first piled into streaming. Grous notes Netflix itself has long framed its competition as everything from TikTok and Instagram to Fortnite and “sleep,” a mindset that fits naturally with the coming wave of AI‑generated video and interactive experiences.​ (In 2017, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings famously said “sleep” was one of the company’s biggest competitors, as it was busy pioneering the binge-watch.)

Grous also sounded a warning for the age of post-AI content: The binge-watch won’t feel as good anymore, and there will be some kind of backlash. As critics such as The New York Times‘ James Poniewozik increasingly note, streaming shows don’t seem to be as re-watchable as even recent hits from the golden age of cable TV, such as Mad Men. Grous said he sees a future where the endangered movie theater makes a comeback. “People are going to want to go outside and meet or go to the theater. Like, we’re not just going to want to be fed AI slop for 16 hours a day.”

Editor’s note: the author worked for Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.