Larry Ellison’s company Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) announced on Wednesday that it is bringing Quantinuum’s Helios quantum computer into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, so OCI customers can use commercial quantum hardware through the cloud instead of having to buy and run the machine themselves.
The two companies have signed a deal that will last several years. Helios will sit alongside the GPUs and high-performance computing systems already available through OCI.
Quantinuum (NASDAQ: QNT) claims that Helios is currently the most accurate commercial quantum computer available.
The customers will access it via Oracle’s quantum computing service, with Oracle and Quantinuum managing the physical machine itself in the background. It is designed for companies who wish to experience quantum computing along with their existing AI and computing services.
Oracle opens Helios access to OCI customers while Quantinuum combines quantum, AI, and HPC computing
Helios uses 98 physical trapped-ion qubits. Quantinuum has already run demonstrations on the system using 48 logical qubits. Logical qubits are designed to help control the errors that can make quantum calculations less reliable.
Helios has reached an average two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921%. That puts its accuracy above the widely watched 99.9% level that is often treated as an important benchmark for quantum systems.
Electricity use is another part of the equation. Quantinuum estimates that a single Helios system consumes less than 1% of the power used by leading supercomputers. Quantum computers are not replacements for traditional supercomputers across every type of workload.
But for jobs that actually suit quantum processing, companies could use Helios as another computing resource while drawing far less electricity than some of the biggest conventional machines.
Oracle, however, is making this quantum push while its finances are getting much more attention from Wall Street in 2026, especially because of how much debt the company has taken on.
Oracle keeps pouring money into computing infrastructure as its debt becomes harder to ignore
Through the end of 2025, Oracle continued borrowing huge sums of money while continuing with the construction of large-scale data-center projects in Texas, Wisconsin, and New Mexico.
Then later, two credit analysts from Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) projected that the sum of Oracle’s debts along with the financing obligations of the leased data centers would balloon up to thrice the present value over the next three years.
Oracle was already carrying far more leverage than some of the other huge technology companies it competes with. Its debt-to-equity ratio stood at roughly 500%. Put simply, Oracle had about $5 of debt for every $1 of shareholder equity.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) was sitting at around 50% using the same measure. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG) was even lower than Amazon.
That did not stop Oracle from going back to the debt market. On one day in February 2026, the company issued $25 billion worth of bonds. Soon after that, Oracle increased the size of its bank credit facility to $10 billion, giving the company room to borrow additional money if it needed it.
In March, however, the problem of debt forced Oracle to reduce the size of construction of its Stargate data-center in Texas after the banks started to reduce the financing of the project due to Oracle being its primary tenant.
The company also started cutting jobs during March. Thousands of employees were laid off, representing roughly 18% of Oracle’s workforce. Oracle did not publicly explain why it was making those cuts, as Cryptopolitan reported before.
Oracle’s stock was already taking a beating by then. At the beginning of April 2026, the shares were down roughly 55% from their September 2025 peak.
Then came another problem in July. S&P Global Ratings, which is part of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), downgraded Oracle’s credit rating. That left the company’s debt sitting just one grade above junk status. If Oracle gets downgraded one more time, it would lose its investment-grade rating and become what Wall Street calls a fallen angel.
That could leave the company paying higher rates whenever it borrows again, while also reducing the number of banks, funds, and other lenders that are willing or permitted to own its debt.
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