Oracle's AI-Driven Cloud Surge Propels Larry Ellison to World's Richest

Oracle's cloud pipeline is stuffed with LLM cash

Comment An industry adage has it that Oracle's calculator only has a plus button, which is reassuring for investors. Yesterday, they were effusive with praise for Big Red over projected revenues as its share price soared more than 27 percent, and CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison was positioned to overtake Elon Musk as the world's richest person. But something doesn't add up. The analyst excitement - "this is a career event happening right now, it's just amazing," one said - is based on anticipated future earnings from remaining performance obligations (RPOs) in the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year. These are contracts signed but not yet paid for. Oracle said the figure had risen to $455 billion. "This is up 359 percent from last year and up $317 billion from the end of Q4 [2025]," said Safra Catz, Oracle CEO. "The enormity of this RPO growth enables us to make a large upward revision to the cloud infrastructure portion of our financial plan," Catz said, before predicting Oracle's cloud infrastructure business would grow 77 percent to $18 billion this fiscal year and then increase to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion over the following four years. Where is the money coming from? Catz continued: "We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who's who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and many others." Such a customer base is in stark contrast to the bedrock of Oracle's global empire, which grew first from dominance of the database market, and then, through an aggressive acquisition spree, to rival SAP in enterprise applications. Oracle has diverged from this path, though, as its latest numbers show. Its cloud infrastructure business has grown by 55 percent over the last year, compared with 11 percent growth in cloud applications, which largely rely on converting on-prem customers to the Oracle cloud. In the first quarter of 2025, cloud infrastructure revenue was 62 percent of its cloud application equivalent. In Q1 2026, it was 87 percent. Ellison said on an investor call: "AI is fundamentally transforming Oracle and the rest of the computer industry, though not everyone fully grasps the extent of the tsunami that is approaching. Look at our quarterly numbers. Some things are undeniably evident. Several world-class AI companies have chosen Oracle to build large-scale GPU-centric datacenters to train their AI models." He then predicted that AI inference - inferring how to respond to new data or questions - would become a much bigger market than AI training, before launching into a starry-eyed vision of the future. "AI inferencing will be used to run robotic factories, robotic cars, robotic greenhouses, biomolecular simulations for drug design, interpreting medical diagnostic images and laboratory results, automating laboratories, placing bets in financial markets, automating legal processes, automating financial processes, automating sales processes. AI is going to generate the computer programs called AI agents that will automate your sales and marketing processes. Let me repeat that. AI is going to automatically write the computer programs that will then automate your sales processes and your legal processes and everything else and in your factories and so on. Think about it." OK, Larry, we will. If we have to. But also consider this: if the demand for Oracle's cloud infrastructure is coming from AI model builders, where is their money coming from? OpenAI, the highest profile among them, seems happy to continue running at a loss for the foreseeable future, and is projected to burn through $8 billion in cash in 2025, as reports suggest it is tapping up investors for the second $30 billion portion of its current funding round. While Oracle might be assured of the billions of dollars stuffing its fiscal pipeline from RPOs, it is not certain whether this will continue for the next four years. In March, John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, told The Register that the race was on among AI vendors in terms of speed, adoption, and being in the market, but "there is extinction coming." "The market will not be able to support this number of model providers that we currently have. From the capital expenditure requirements through to revenue, the cloud market only bears three [players] and you can expect the same with GenAI model developers," he said. There will be a more gradual "pruning" of AI developers than the dramatic bubble burst of the dotcom era, Lovelock added. Note that he only sees three significant players in the cloud market, and Oracle is not one of them. Despite Ellison's dream of automating our workplace tasks, there's evidence raising questions over AI's usefulness in business. A recent UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot revealed no discernible gain in productivity. A study from Salesforce found LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the importance of customer confidentiality. Mainstream media is also casting doubt over the supposed omnipotence of LLMs. It's not just GenAI model builders spending big with Oracle, though. One analyst speaking to CNBC pointed out that the big hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google are "offloading their capacity to other datacenter providers," including Oracle. DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria said: "These are not organic customers to Oracle. This is Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's customers that will use Oracle capacity." Eventually, these cloud vendors' own capacity will catch up with demand. And before long, the extinction will strike the LLM providers. Only then will Oracle's backers know if they've made the right calculation. ®

Oracle nears $1 trillion valuation, Ellison edges toward richest-person title

Sept 11 (Reuters) - Oracle's (ORCL.N), opens new tab shares rose on Thursday, adding to a record run in the previous session and lifting stocks across the tech sector, as the company inches closer to the trillion-dollar club on soaring gains from its AI cloud business. The enterprise software maker's remarkable rise, fueled by a wave of multi-billion-dollar cloud deals, puts the spotlight on the scramble for computing power from companies that are pouring billions to become leaders in the AI race. The stock's gains also put Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison on course to surpass Elon Musk, who is the world's richest man. "Oracle lit a fire under the rekindled AI trade," said Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, adding that the company's multi-billion-dollar demand outlook has triggered a "ripple effect" for AI-related stocks. The Wall Street Journal also reported on Wednesday that OpenAI has signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle for computing power, among the biggest in history, likely accounting for the bulk of the new revenue Oracle outlined on Tuesday. Oracle's shares were last up 1.5% in premarket trading after climbing as much as 35.9% on Wednesday, lifting the company's market valuation to a record $933 billion, as of last close. The stock has nearly doubled in value this year, making it among the top performers in the S&P 500 index (.SPX), opens new tab, trouncing gains made by the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks. Co-founder Ellison saw his net worth soar by nearly $100 billion to $392.6 billion, largely driven by his 41% stake in Oracle, compared with Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO Musk's $439.9 billion fortune that still tops Forbes' global wealth rankings. Oracle's shares were trading at a premium compared to its cloud services peers. Their 12-month forward price-to-earnings multiple was 45.3, compared to Amazon's 31.3 and Microsoft's 31. Reporting by Joel Jose and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Arpan Varghese and Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence * ADAS, AV & Safety * Software-Defined Vehicle * Sustainable & EV Supply Chain

How Oracle's Larry Ellison rode the AI 'tsunami'

Oracle has become the latest big winner from Wall Street's blockbuster bet on artificial intelligence, for now. Co-founder Larry Ellison and chief executive Safra Catz, in an earnings report this week, revealed Oracle's pipeline of contracts to supply computing power to AI groups had expanded to $455bn from just $138bn three months ago. The sheer scale of Oracle's advance stunned Wall Street, sending the company's shares up 36 per cent to a record high on Wednesday and briefly edging Ellison ahead of Elon Musk as the world's richest man. "AI is fundamentally transforming Oracle and the rest of the computer industry, though not everyone fully grasps the extent of the tsunami that is approaching," Ellison told investors. Equally, Ellison, 81, himself was slow to recognise the importance of cloud computing, which he once dismissed as "complete gibberish". With the rise of generative AI, he has alongside Catz seized the opportunity to vault Oracle into contention with industry giants such as Amazon and Microsoft in the race to win huge data centre contracts. Oracle's ability to successfully ride the AI tsunami now depends on if it can deliver the hardware it has promised -- and on whether its roster of clients will ultimately be able to pay for it. A large chunk of its future AI business comes from a five-year deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI worth $300bn, according to people familiar with the matter. Oracle's AI hopes are closely tied to the lossmaking AI start-up's ability to finance its own future growth. "Oracle is now a one-way bet on OpenAI's ability to raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new capital," said Charles Fitzgerald, an angel investor and former Microsoft executive. Executives provided few details this week about how Oracle itself would finance the massive increase in capital investment required to fulfil these contracts with OpenAI and its AI rivals -- or what kind of profits it would generate. Fitzgerald added that it was unclear how Oracle would make a decent return from its AI spending, since its strategy of selling access to large clusters of Nvidia GPUs to train and run AI models was a highly competitive business that did not leave room for significant margins. Oracle executives have claimed that the company has superior technology, including better networking capabilities, enabling it to run giant cloud systems far more cheaply than others. Founded in the late 1970s, and once best-known for selling business database software, the company has recovered from its slow start in a cloud computing market that has since evolved into AI infrastructure. "The beauty of this story is they were considered the villain, and investors thought they'd missed cloud and so were going to miss AI," said Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies. "There has never been an inflection this big." One former Oracle executive said Catz and Ellison were both reluctant to invest in the cloud and had been slow to recognise the threat posed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) when it started to offer cloud database services to its customers in the mid 00s, hitting at Oracle's core business. "Larry was early to dismiss cloud and now he's trying to rebrand as a sage who heralded the AI era," the executive said. One large Oracle investor said the company's growth had stagnated for a decade until 2022 and it had made several mis-steps with its cloud business. But, they added, Oracle had entered a "second phase" in recent years with a focus on hiring veterans from Amazon, Google and Microsoft to help build up its expertise in data centres so it can chase large contracts. Despite launching its cloud business a decade after market leader AWS, Oracle's approach -- which focuses on renting out servers and other data centre equipment dedicated to single customers -- has proven popular with companies that develop proprietary AI models churning vast amounts of data. Oracle has also undercut major cloud rivals on price. It capitalised on capacity constraints experienced by rivals such as Microsoft, who have had to pass on major contracts and sought capacity from specialised AI-computing providers such as CoreWeave to meet demand from customers. OpenAI's first deal with Oracle came last year at a time when Microsoft struggled to meet the AI start-up's needs. Oracle then reached an agreement in January to partner with OpenAI and SoftBank on the $500bn Stargate data centre project. It agreed to kit out and operate a 2 gigawatt site in Abilene, Texas, that is being developed by start-up Crusoe and investment group Blue Owl Capital. Ellison's political connections, as one of US President Donald Trump's earliest backers in the tech industry, has helped secure Oracle's place at the table, including a possible deal to spinout TikTok's US arm. It has benefited from several big deals with ByteDance, the parent company of the social media app, including to store TikTok's US data. In July, it emerged that OpenAI had expanded its relationship with Oracle, locking in a five-year deal for future computing capacity worth $300bn. The Wall Street Journal first reported the size of the agreement. Despite OpenAI's outsized role, Oracle has also secured contracts with other large technology companies, including Meta, xAI and Nvidia, in recent quarters. Investors have been buoyed by the swift growth of its AI revenues and the potential for it to more aggressively compete with large rivals. Tony Wang, a portfolio manager at T Rowe Price, an Oracle shareholder, said the company was growing the fastest among any of its "hyperscaler" rivals, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. He said it was becoming a popular first choice rather than a last resort amid a shortage in key components. "The durability of this growth story is clearly underestimated -- and it's not just about chip shortages anymore," he said. Yet Thill, the Jefferies analyst, said it was still unclear how wide Oracle's margins were on these deals and whether it would be able to fully deliver on these contracts. Thill said Oracle's promise to its growing stable of demanding AI customers remained "a bit like: 'We'll build this. Trust me.'"

Broadcom is a big Oracle derivative play as investors get keen on next phase of AI

Oracle 's staggering forecast has reignited enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, particularly for one specialized chipmaker. The knockout revenue forecast made it clear that demand for AI workloads is set to continue, reassuring investors about long-term returns beyond the resource-intensive "training" phase of AI models. In other words, the shift to the "inference" phase -- where a trained model can make predictions and real-world conclusions based on new data -- has arrived. The market has long expected a higher payout from the inference phase of the AI buildout cycle, and many see Broadcom as a huge beneficiary. It is the leading maker of chips that are considered better-suited and cheaper for inference, which is attractive for hyperscalers looking to cut their soaring AI costs. Shares of the Broadcom jumped about 8% on Wednesday, riding the high of Oracle's roughly 40% pop. Broadcom is a direct beneficiary of Oracle's forecast, Stephanie Link, Hightower Advisors chief investment strategist and portfolio manager said Wednesday. "Inference is obviously going to be the next big driver, and Broadcom is certainly the number one player," Link told CNBC. "That's not to say that Nvidia and AMD and many other companies won't benefit, but I just don't think that Broadcom is as widely owned or or understood as Nvidia ... In the past year, Broadcom actually has outperformed Nvidia, and I think it is because we are starting to see slow respect and appreciation for what they're doing." Broadcom is Link's largest position, accounting for 7% of her portfolio. She's owned the stock for about four years and recently added to her position after its quarterly results. AVGO 1Y mountain Broadcom stock performance over the past year. Broadcom's shares are up 56% year to date and have jumped more than 145% over the past year. The company is the leader in merchant ASICs -- or Application-Specific Integrated Circuits -- which are custom processors primarily used for AI inference and networking. ASICs are generally cheaper than general-purpose GPUs and CPUs when it comes to inference, given their low power usage in data centers and highly optimized performance for specific tasks, meaning lower cost per inference request. Link highlighted Broadcom's high-margin software business and recent acquisitions as attractive aspects of the stock. Broadcom's revenue is split between semiconductor hardware and software, with about 41% of total revenue coming from infrastructure software, or its ASICs, networking chips and storage controllers. Software tends to be more profitable than hardware, given that it has lower development costs and can lead to recurring revenue. "Why I think Broadcom, for me, makes more sense, is because it's more diversified, and they had every single segment beat expectations on AI, semis, infrastructure and software. Better EBITDA, better operating income," Link said, adding that Broadcom also has industry-lading gross margins at about 78.4%. The pile-in on Broadcom comes after Oracle nearly turned into a hyperscaler overnight. The cloud infrastructure provider on Tuesday surprisingly reported that its remaining performance obligations -- a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized -- jumped 359% from a year earlier to $455 billion. Oracle now expects $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in the 2026 fiscal year, with the company calling for the annual sum to reach $144 billion in the 2030 fiscal year. Oracle chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said during the company's earnings call that the AI inferencing market will be "much, much larger" than the AI training market. "A lot of people are looking for inferencing capacity. I mean people are running out of inferencing capacity," Ellison said during the call, recalling a client that previously requested for "all the capacity you have that's currently not being used anywhere in the world." The Oracle co-founder added that, "in the end, all this money we're spending on training is going to have to be translated into products that are sold, which is all inferencing."

Oracle's Larry Ellison Might Surpass Elon Musk As The Richest Person on Earth

Larry Ellison has surpassed Musk as the world's richest person after Oracle stock is up more than 40% on AI-driven growth. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison is having a good morning. Oracle's stock is up more than 42% on Wednesday, thanks to an earnings call on Tuesday that left investors stunned. The company missed earnings and revenue estimates, but the forward looking guidance alone was apparently good enough to get investors to rally around it. A bulk of that reaction had to do with the revenue that AI computing demand was expected to bring to Oracle's cloud infrastructure service. The shares skyrocketed in response. Oracle’s stock is now on pace to have its largest single session surge since the dot-com boom, according to CNBC. With the current surge in shares, Ellison has increased his wealth by more than $100 billion, thanks to the roughly 1.16 billion shares he owns. This meteoric rise grabbed him the title of the richest person on Earth from the former title holder, Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As of Tuesday, Ellison's current total fortune was worth $295 billion, having increased by $100 billion in worth in just the past year. Today's additional increase has catapulted him to a staggering $389 billion, surpassing Elon Musk's whopping $384 billion fortune. Musk was first named the richest man in the world in 2021, and has since been up and down on the list. He has held the title consistently since last year and briefly became the first person to surpass $400 billion net worth in December. Although Ellison has overtaken him on the list, Musk might reverse that yet again soon. Musk is facing the potential of becoming the world's first trillionaire, that is if the massive and unprecedented proposed pay package plan by the Tesla board gets approved by shareholders. Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle in the late 1970s with the CIA as an early customer. Decades down the line, the database software company now specializes in AI-first cloud computing and competes with other giants like Microsoft's Azure, Alphabet's Google Cloud, and Amazon's AWS. It's the aggressively positive and AI-driven outlook for its cloud infrastructure business that has led to investor delight and the 81-year-old Ellison is benefiting handsomely from it. Although the revenue estimates were down, the company said it was expecting to collect more than half a trillion dollars extra thanks to four multi-billion-dollar contracts it signed in the past quarter. At the company's earnings call, CEO Safra Catz mentioned OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and Elon Musk's xAI as some of the company it has "significant cloud contracts with." Company executives shared that they are expecting to finalize even more multi-billion-dollar deals in the near future. Oracle, and Ellison, are hell-bent on AI. The company recently made headlines for an alleged plan to spend more than $1 billion a year to run a new data center in Texas on gas generators rather than wait for approval and infrastructure to pull the electricity from the local grid. Oracle is also one of the partners in the Trump administration's ambitious AI project Stargate. Cloud computing might be one of the clearest early winners of the AI hype. AI companies are scouring for more computing capacity as they try to compete with each other and scale operations, and they are willing to spend a hefty amount of money for it. Enter cloud infrastructure providers, like Oracle and Microsoft, that provide computing power for large AI models. Both the companies showed a meteoric stock increase after their recent earnings report. In its latest earnings report in July, Microsoft reported that sales were up 18% from last year and that revenue for its cloud computing platform Azure had surpassed $75 billion this year, up 34% from last. Despite these numbers accompanying Microsoft's largest ever quarterly capital expenditure forecast, the market went crazy for it. The shares jumped and the tech giant briefly became the second-ever company to hit $4 trillion market valuation.

Oracle marches toward $1 trillion club; tech stocks cheer

Sept 11 (Reuters) - Oracle's (ORCL.N), opens new tab shares rose on Thursday, adding to a record run in the previous session and lifting stocks across the tech sector, as the company inches closer to the coveted trillion-dollar club on soaring gains from its AI cloud business. The enterprise software maker's remarkable rise, fueled by a wave of multi-billion-dollar cloud deals, puts the spotlight on the scramble for computing power from companies that are pouring billions to become leaders in the AI race. The stock's gains also put Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison on course to beat Elon Musk as the world's richest man. "Oracle lit a fire under the rekindled AI trade," said Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, adding that the company's billion-dollar demand outlook has triggered a "ripple effect" for AI-related stocks. The Wall Street Journal also reported on Wednesday that OpenAI has signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle for computing power, among the biggest in history, likely accounting for the bulk of the new revenue Oracle outlined on Tuesday. Oracle's shares were last up 2% in premarket trading after climbing as much as 35.9% on Wednesday, lifting the company's market capitalization to a record $933 billion, as of last close. Co-founder Ellison saw his net worth soar by nearly $100 billion to $392.6 billion, largely driven by his 41% stake in Oracle, compared with Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO Musk's $439.9 billion fortune that still tops Forbes' global wealth rankings. Shares of Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Broadcom (AVGO.O), opens new tab, which supply semiconductors used in data centers, were also marginally up, extending gains from the previous session. Peers in Asia also surged. Oracle's shares were trading at a premium compared to its cloud services peers. Their 12-month forward price-to-earnings multiple was 45.3, compared to Amazon's 31.3 and Microsoft's 31. Reporting by Joel Jose in Bengaluru; Editing by Arpan Varghese and Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence * ADAS, AV & Safety * Software-Defined Vehicle * Sustainable & EV Supply Chain

Oracle shares jump 20% on surge in future AI revenue

Oracle reported a massive jump in bookings of future artificial intelligence business for its cloud infrastructure unit on Tuesday, sending shares in the US database company up 20 per cent in after-hours trading. The company's remaining performance obligations -- business it has booked that will feed through into future revenue -- leapt to $455bn, up from only $138bn three months ago. Safra Catz, chief executive, called it an "astonishing quarter" that had included Oracle signing "four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers" in the latest three months. Wall Street had been primed for a leap in bookings following the disclosure of a new $30bn-a-year contract the company signed in July, but had not expected the overall backlog to grow as fast. The company, which was late to pivot to the cloud, has reaped the rewards of a groundswell in demand for data centre infrastructure from AI start-ups and other major technology companies. Earlier this year it signed a deal to partner with OpenAI and SoftBank on the $500bn Stargate project. The after-hours surge in Oracle's share price, which added $135bn to its stock market value, follows a gain of roughly 43 per cent in the year-to-date ahead of Tuesday's earnings release, propelling founder Larry Ellison up the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, below only Elon Musk with an estimated net worth in excess of $290bn. For the latest quarter Oracle reported a 12 per cent gain in revenue, to $14.9bn, slightly below the $15bn Wall Street had been expecting. Adjusted net income rose 8 per cent to $4.3bn, higher than analysts' expectations. The earnings came more than a month after rival tech companies including Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft. Collectively, these four companies are on course to spend more than $350bn this year on data centres and other AI infrastructure and more than $400bn in 2026. Oracle has previously committed to investing more than $25bn in the current fiscal year, up from $21bn last year but well below its rivals. In July, it emerged OpenAI had agreed to lease 4.5 gigawatts of computing power from Oracle in a deal worth about $30bn a year. The move will entail Oracle developing multiple data centres across the US to satisfy the start-up's computer-processing demands, having already reached a deal to supply a 1.2GW site in Abilene, Texas.

Stunned analysts ratchet up targets on Oracle, Bank of America upgrades. Full Wall Street reaction

Analysts are stunned by Oracle's cloud growth projections given in the company's first-quarter report, with many cementing the stock as an artificial intelligence frontrunner alongside the market's biggest tech giants. Oracle on Tuesday missed Wall Street's consensus earnings and revenue estimates but surprised the Street when it said that remaining performance obligations -- a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized -- jumped 359% from a year earlier to $455 billion. The company now sees $144 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in the 2030 fiscal year, up from $10.3 billion in fiscal 2025. Chief executive Safra Catz announced that the company signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the quarter. Shares skyrocketed 30% in premarket trading Wednesday on the results, putting them on pace for their best day since dot-com boom of 1999. Oracle shares are up nearly 45% year to date. ORCL 1Y mountain Oracle stock performance over the past year. Several analysts got more bullish on the results and lifted their price targets on the stock, noting that this report suggests Oracle's revenue is becoming centered around its GPU-as-a-Service business. Bank of America notably upgraded Oracle to buy and hiked its price target to $368. That signals 52.4% upside from Tuesday's close. "Ramping capex was holding us back, since visibility on ROI for growing capex was lacking. While visibility is still limited on that front, the outlook for OCI revenue alone (51% 4-year CAGR), suggests a step function in demand," BofA analyst Brad Sills said. Take a look at what a handful of big-name firms had to say: Bank of America: upgrades to buy from neutral, raises price target by $73 to $368 "Although profitability of AI workloads remains a key debate, it is clear that Oracle is capturing share in the large and rapidly growing market for AI infrastructure (we estimate that the AI applications industry alone will represent $155 billion by 2030). Oracle is clearly leveraging a number of advantages in its cloud software/hardware businesses to attract the largest of the AI enterprises, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, NVIDIA and AMD). These visible reference customers should help position Oracle to capture share of AI compute," Sills said in a note to clients. UBS: keeps buy rating, lifts price target by $80 to $360 "Oracle posted 1Q/Aug results (11% c/c revs growth, 54% cloud infra growth) that fell slightly short and set FY27 cloud infra guidance of $32b that was also short of our estimate, but in our view it won't matter. The scale of the backlog - $455b, with $317b of deals added in 1Q/Aug alone - is so materially above Street estimates and drives such a material upward revision to FY28+ estimates that the stock deserves to re-rate materially higher, turning Oracle into perhaps the biggest large-cap growth acceleration story in all of tech," analyst Karl Keirstead wrote in a note. "When looking at Oracle on a growth-adjusted basis we still view the stock as inexpensive." Morgan Stanley: keeps equal weight rating, $246 price target "An extraordinary $332 billion in bookings in Oracle's Q1 represents not only the biggest bookings number we've ever seen in software, but a fundamental shift in the business model towards Data Center Operator. Despite gross margin headwinds, out-year EPS targets are likely to move materially higher," analyst Keith Weiss said. Deutsche Bank: maintains buy rating, $335 price target "In our near 20 years covering Oracle and for that matter the entire Software industry, there are few quarterly results that match F1Q both in terms of magnitude of revision and clarity of the moment. With RPO +359% y/y well exceeding a super lofty expectation for doubling, Oracle has underscored its position as the leader in AI infrastructure underpinned by several key advantages that stem from its deep technology roots and know-how in parallel computing," analyst Brad Zelnick wrote in a note. "With many prognosticating the death of SaaS software with the possibility of large incumbents being supplanted by AI-native disruptors, we believe it's actually Oracle's underlying infrastructure that can enable apps success in the new AI paradigm." Barclays: reiterates overweight rating, $281 price target "Oracle as a business is significantly changing with these contracts and hence, shares will likely trade higher. Initial indications about these large contracts and management commentary confirm that long-term revenue assumptions ($104bn in FY29, given last October) are too low as Oracle's infrastructure business alone is now expected to deliver $114bn in FY29," analyst Raimo Lenschow said in a Tuesday note. "We think investors will ignore that Oracle's Q1 was more mixed as the long-term changes are more important." Guggenheim: reiterates buy rating, hikes price target to $375 from $250 "Oracle's F1Q26 results give a peek into a future that we haven't seen in over 25 years covering the Software sector. Oracle has always been a technology company first, even when growth dropped to single digits, honing its craft around its technology-leading database but also expanding well beyond this. ... But is this sustainable? If Oracle could come from a 4th mover advantage, couldn't a 5th mover see similar benefits? Perhaps. But Oracle didn't start from scratch and keep in mind, Oracle came out with RAC 25 years ago, which means its original patents have expired - and no one has come up with an answer to it even today. We think this is sustainable, as we move from AI Training, to AI Inferencing, to more Traditional Cloud workloads, and nontraditional Sovereign Clouds, Dedicated Regions, Cloud at Customer, and finally Oracle Database Multi-Cloud." Stifel: keeps buy rating, increases target to $350 from $250 To call it a blow-out quarter would be somewhat unfair to Oracle as 359% RPO growth driven by mega contracts with multiple LLM vendors, a sizable uptick in out-year OCI growth rates and management's commentary around accelerating operating income growth targets which helps to reduce concerns around gross margin compression stemming from the growing capex bill sent the stock +~25% afterhours. With respect to Capex, the company once again raised its FY26 target to ~$35B based on the dramatic uptick in RPO. Given the current backlog, and management commentary that RPO is likely to surpass $500B in coming quarters, we expect the Capex spending to continue to grow at a very healthy clip.

Oracle surges on AI cloud growth as customers race to secure computing capacity

Sept 10 (Reuters) - Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab shares soared about 33% before the bell on Wednesday after the company pointed to a demand surge for its cloud services from AI firms, underscoring its deeper push into the backbone of artificial intelligence systems. The surge in Oracle's cloud business reflects a broader shift in the industry, with companies such as OpenAI and xAI scrambling to secure massive computing capacity needed to stay ahead in the AI race by boosting spending to hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The company will add about $234 billion to its market valuation, taking the total valuation to around $904 billion, if premarket gains hold, taking Oracle closer to the coveted $1 trillion-dollar club. Its shares have risen 45% so far this year, outperforming stocks in the so-called Magnificent Seven and the broader S&P 500 index (.SPX), opens new tab, with investors betting big on AI-driven cloud firms. Oracle's results lifted shares of Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab, Broadcom (AVGO.O), opens new tab and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab, which supply semiconductors used in data centers. Shares of the companies rose between 2% and 3.3% in premarket trading. Competitor CoreWeave's (CRWV.O), opens new tab shares were up 7% before the bell. Oracle reported four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three clients during the August quarter, highlighting a robust appetite for its cloud services. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Still, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Amazon Web Services (AMZN.O), opens new tab and Google Cloud (GOOGL.O), opens new tab dominate the cloud computing market with a combined 65% share, while Oracle, Alibaba, CoreWeave and others hold a smaller slice of the market. The company has struck deals with Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft let their cloud customers run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) alongside native services. The revenue from these partnerships rose more than sixteen-fold in the first quarter. "What matters here is that this figure now includes contributions from the Stargate venture and two other big AI players, meaning revenues beyond 2026 go much higher," said Ben Reitzes, analyst at Melius Research. Analysts also flagged Oracle's role in SoftBank and OpenAI's Stargate project as another tailwind, giving the company a foothold in the large-scale AI infrastructure project that is expected to channel about $500 billion in spending. Oracle also supplies cloud services to xAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, the world's richest person and a longtime ally of the cloud computing company's chairman Larry Ellison. Ellison, 81, whose net worth is largely built on his 41% stake in Oracle, is fast approaching Musk in the race for the world's richest title, according to Forbes data. Oracle's stock is trading at over 33.34 times its 12-month forward earnings estimates, compared with Amazon's 32.34 and Microsoft's 30.83. Reporting by Akriti Shah and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Alun John in London; Editing by Amanda Cooper and Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Business Akash Sriram Thomson Reuters Akash reports on technology companies in the United States, electric vehicle companies, and the space industry. His reporting usually appears in the Autos & Transportation and Technology sections. He has a postgraduate degree in Conflict, Development, and Security from the University of Leeds. Akash's interests include music, football (soccer), and Formula 1.

Wall Street is funding Oracle's massive AI power play

For most of its life, Oracle has sold software and swagger. This week's earnings changed the register. On the call, the company pointed to a contract book swollen to the hundreds of billions and began talking in the language of capacity delivered and rooms energized. The product on offer now is measured in megawatts rather than features. Those disclosures set the table, and a few hours later, the picture sharpened. The Wall Street Journal reported a five-year, $300 billion OpenAI commitment that begins in 2027, a footprint that implies power on the scale of several plants. The stock had already ripped on the earnings print; the Journal's reporting explained the ambition behind it. Oracle isn't auditioning a clever app. It's proposing an AI grid, and -- for the moment -- Wall Street is willing to finance the build. That reframes what progress looks like and shifts the center of gravity. The new unit of progress isn't daily active users; it's megawatts. The relevant milestones are energized halls, interconnects that actually go live, and a load that holds during peaks. To make any of this real, Oracle needs sites that clear permits, transformers that arrive on time, crews to wire miles of copper, and enough generation behind the meter to keep racks humming. The plan reads less like a tech roadmap and more like an industrial plan. The pitch to investors lands because it's simple. Oracle says demand for compute is booked years out, converting into revenue as physical capacity comes online. The cadence resembles energy offtake more than quarterly upgrade cycles -- long obligations, scheduled handoffs, payment when the lights turn on. If the build keeps pace, cash flows behave like a pipeline -- steady, contracted, visible -- with the kind of line-of-sight software chiefs dream about. The risks are just as plain. Between a PowerPoint deck and a powered hall sits a pile of unglamorous constraints: steel and transformers with long lead times, transmission that takes years to expand, permits that invite local politics, and the patience of the towns where the servers (and the substations) will live. Financing adds its own risks -- capital expenditures that will run in the tens of billions and near-term margin pressure while capacity ramps -- and the (opinionated) bond market doesn't grade on a curve. Time and concentration sharpen the edge. The OpenAI clock doesn't start until 2027, leaving a runway where grid studies, procurement bottlenecks, and labor scarcity can nudge handovers to the right. One marquee tenant can shape use curves and headline risk; diversification has to be more than a promise. That's the bargain on the table: value Oracle like a utility because it delivers like one and judge it on whether concrete keeps turning into powered rooms right on schedule. Hours later, the scale of those commitments came into sharper focus. The Wall Street Journal made clear what was embedded in those obligations: a single tenant with a contract so large it requires gigawatts of new power. It helps explain why backlog growth has suddenly gone vertical, and why investors are treating the numbers less as bookings and more as a utility-style offtake. The scale recasts Oracle's role from vendor to infrastructure landlord and line-builder, responsible for siting, procuring energy, and handing capacity to tenants on a schedule. That's the language of utilities more than it is of tech. The OpenAI deal didn't spark the rally -- the company's forward-looking earnings did -- but it crystallized what the Street was actually cheering. Even in an AI moment addicted to superlatives, those numbers force a genre shift. The market's reaction -- Oracle posted its biggest one-day jump since 1992 and briefly vaulted Larry Ellison into the top slot of the "richest person in the world" list -- tells you how investors are reading the turn. They're not rewarding a product. They're rewarding a promise: that Oracle can marshal power and deliver compute on time while the rest of the industry stares at interconnection queues. Promises, of course, are cheap. But the bill for this one includes a capex figure stacked with commas.($35 billion, up about $25 billion from prior guidance) and a willingness to take on more debt to stand up the steel. Utilities make that decision under regulators' noses and earn a set return. Oracle will have to make it under the market's. Database@Azure came first, then Google Cloud, and this summer Database@AWS went live in the U.S. It sounds tactical; it's actually strategic. If the data that runs a business already lives on Oracle's rails -- and customers can tap it from whichever hyperscaler region is handy -- there's no migration gauntlet standing between those teams and an AI feature. Convenience makes a better moat than a keynote demo ever could. That plumbing is also why Oracle can sell compute like capacity. If switching costs flatten and distribution rides on everyone else's cloud, the activation energy drops. Oracle doesn't need to win a theology fight about architectures; it needs to hand customers something that works right now in the places they already operate. When executives say most of the multiyear revenue ramp is already booked, that's the logic -- signed obligations that convert as the physical world catches up. It's boring. Money loves boring. But plumbing only gets you so far. The hardest part of Oracle's story isn't GPUs; it's electricity. In the near term, the U.S. is running into the limits of its grid in exactly the places data centers want to be. Transmission upgrades take years. Interconnect queues are thick with good intentions. Local fights about land, noise, and water are already the price of doing business from Northern Virginia to Central Ohio to North Texas. Oracle can buy accelerators with a purchase order, but the company can't buy five years of permitting. The coming build will stretch across multiple states and lean on partners, including energy-savvy operators who know how to wring power from messy markets. That spreads risk. It also spreads politics. The other hard part for Oracle's plan is time. The company's backlog looks like certainty; the calendar doesn't. In a bull case, Oracle's build cadence syncs with tenant readiness and recognition waterfalls into exactly the hockey stick Wall Street is modeling. In a bear case, a few quarters slip to the right, use lags, and the Street remembers it cares about margins again. Either way, this is an infrastructure story wearing a software ticker. That's a policy fight as much as a procurement choice, and it won't stay quiet. Regulators will push on resiliency and emissions. Communities will ask why an industrial campus gets priority while the neighborhood across the highway is still waiting on upgrades. Oracle is fluent in this conversation. It has lived inside government tech for decades and sits near the center of the national-security work -- from health records to sensitive data environments -- the kind of "trust the adults" posture that wins long contracts. That reputation helps when the topic turns to reliability and oversight. But it also raises the bar. Utilities are designed to fail gracefully. Tech companies are designed to move fast. Oracle is promising to do both. Concentration risk is the not-to-be-ignored subplot. The reported OpenAI commitment is the gravitational body in this system. It dwarfs the lab's current revenue base and dares both parties to grow into it -- OpenAI by finding uses and customers for all that compute, Oracle by building the places for it to live. OpenAI expects to remain unprofitable for years as it scales, and Oracle will likely need new debt to deliver, all while keeping the rest of the business humming. There are other large tenants in the pipeline and more to come; there will need to be. A grid built for one cathedralesque customer is a sculpture. A grid built for many is a business. For now, investors are pricing the upside and squinting at the rest. The share surge and Ellison's wealth whiplash are less about personality than signal: a market saying "yes" to a company choosing the dull, necessary part of AI and promising to industrialize it. But what happens when the sugar high fades and Oracle has to prove conversion -- backlog to revenue, revenue to cash -- on a grid that ignores calendar guidance? The answer won't arrive in an onstage demo. It will show up in boring, quarterly increments: which sites went live, which interconnects cleared, how many megawatts were actually handed over, and whether tenants actually used them. Oracle seems to understand that the only way out is through. Put the database where customers already are. Turn rivals into distribution. Pre-sell the output. Build capacity. Rinse and repeat. That might not draw applause at a developer show, but it buys patience from CFOs who want something that works and keeps working. If Oracle keeps that promise -- if it turns a once-controversial database company into an AI utility with the temperament of a grid operator -- the multiple won't hang on software mystique. It will hang on reliability. And that's the tell. The scarce commodity in the AI boom isn't novelty. It's time on a machine that's ready -- today. Oracle is betting its future that it can deliver that time, at industrial scale, on a schedule the grid and the market will accept. If it does, this week won't read as a spike; it'll read as the prologue to a new kind of power company -- one that sells compute by the megawatt and stability by the quarter. If it doesn't, the backlog will look less like inevitability and more like ambition, and the market will remember how quickly it can reprice ambition. For once, the boring part decides the plot.

Oracle pops 20% on growth projections even as earnings miss estimates

Oracle CEO Safra Catz, center, speaks during a dinner at the White House in Washington on Sept. 4, 2025. President Donald Trump hosted technology and business leaders for dinner after they joined First Lady Melania Trump's meeting of the Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force at the White House. Oracle shares spiked 20% in extended trading on Tuesday after the database software maker indicated hefty growth prospects even as earnings and revenue missed estimates. Here's how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus: Revenue increased 12% from a year earlier during the quarter, which ended on Aug. 31, according to a statement. Net income was about flat at $2.93 billion, or $1.01 per share, compared to $2.93 billion, or $1.03 per share, in the same quarter last year. Oracle said its remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been contracted, now stands at $455 billion, up some 359% from a year earlier. During the quarter OpenAI said it signed an agreement with Oracle to develop 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity. Alongside larger cloud providers such as Microsoft, Oracle has been one of the big winners of the AI boom, due to its cloud infrastructure business and its access to Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) needed for large workloads. CEO Safra Catz said in the statement that the company signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the quarter. Also in the quarter, Oracle said cloud rival Google's Gemini artificial intelligence models would become available on Oracle's cloud infrastructure. Oracle's generated $3.3 billion in revenue from cloud infrastructure, up 55%. The growth rate was 52% in the fiscal fourth quarter. The shares hit a record last month and are up 45% in 2025 as of Tuesday's close, while the S&P 500 index has gained 11%. A gain of 22% on Wednesday would represent the best day for the stock since the dot-com boom of 1999 and the third-best day ever. It would also lift the company's market cap past $800 billion. Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET. This is developing news. Please check back for updates. -- CNBC's Ari Levy contributed to this report

Oracle's Late AI Bet Sends Shares Soaring, Ellison Tops Musk as World's Richest Man - Decrypt

Founder Larry Ellison's fortune swelled by nearly $100 billion, making him the world's richest person. Oracle Corp. stock rocketed as much as 40% in intraday trading -- a rally so dramatic, it appears to have set a record for any company valued north of $500 billion. The trigger? A bold AI strategy finally paying off. At the heart of today's fireworks is Oracle's up-close-and-personal pivot into artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company revealed that its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) business now expects massive revenue growth: CEO Safra Catz said OCI revenue is expected to reach $18 billion in the current fiscal year, then grow to $32 billion in fiscal year 2027, and eventually $144 billion in the following three years. But numbers alone don't explain the thrill. The real signal: a massive pipeline of future business. Oracle's "remaining performance obligations" -- essentially what's been booked but not yet recognized -- soared 359% year-over-year to $455 billion, verging on a half-trillion-dollar backlog, the company reported. CEO Safra Catz didn't hide the enthusiasm, stating that most of the multiyear growth is already locked in, and more multibillion-dollar contracts are expected in the coming months. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers, and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Oracle's AI attractiveness comes from its strategic alliances and neutral positioning in the AI arms race. It's part of Stargate, a massive infrastructure initiative with OpenAI and SoftBank, giving Oracle preferred status as a compute-provider-of-choice. Crucially, Oracle claims to offer AI inferencing capabilities, running models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok directly within its database stack, a convenience hyperscalers have yet to match. That unique positioning -- neutral, integrated, and AI-enabled -- has turned once-lagging Oracle into a major contender in AI infrastructure. In one of those rare moments where investor glee merges with spectacle, Larry Ellison vaulted past Elon Musk to become the world's richest person, thanks to the stock surge. His net worth swelled by around $100 billion to roughly $393-400 billion. Not everyone's as ecstatic as Mrs. Ellison: Analysts caution the aggressive capex -- Oracle expects to spend $35 billion to build data-center and supply AI chips -- could dent free-cash-flow in the near term and pressure margins. AI was the marquee act, but Oracle also highlighted four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers in its latest quarter. That helped lift first-quarter revenue by 12% to $14.93 billion, including a 28% jump in cloud revenue to $7.2 billion. Analysts at Piper Sandler and Bank of America weren't shy either, raising price targets and upgrading the stock -- noting the AI-driven backlog as "too strong to be summed up simply as a blow-out." Oracle's AI pivot has become an investor tidal wave, backed by real contracts, locked-in backlog, and infrastructure ambitions that others can't match -- at least right now. Whether the swell leads to a sea change or tidal recession depends on execution. But for now, Oracle has Wall Street enthralled, and its AI story is delivering more than just talking points -- it's delivering stock market fireworks. And if that's not a mixed metaphor, then nothing is.

Oracle soars as AI-driven cloud infrastructure demand rockets towards $0.5 trillion a year

Oracle CEO Safra Catz worked her magic on Wall Street yesterday, as the company's share price soared on the back of upgraded $500 billion expectations for its cloud infrastructure business as the AI boom continues. The uptick, the biggest single day gain for the stock in over a quarter of a century, was all the more remarkable perhaps given the firm actually fell short of analyst expectations for its Q1 numbers, with revenue of $14.93 billion, up 12% year-on-year, but less than the $15 billion anticipated. Net income was flat year-on-year at $2.93 billion. Normally that might have sent the 'show me the AI money' short termists on Wall Street into their all-too-familiar over-reaction, but Catz took everyone's breath away by announcing that Oracle signed four multi-billion dollar contracts with three customers during the quarter, including one set to pull in $30 billion+ per annum. (No names were attached to these, but you probably don't need to look much further than OpenAI for that big one). As a result, Oracle's Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) exploded by 359% to hit $455 billion so far as demand for more and more AI infrastructure remains insatiable. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue is now expected to top $18 billion this fiscal year, $32 billion in fiscal 27, rising to $144 billion in fiscal 2030. For comparison, arch-rival AWS's cloud revenue is around $112 billion. For Q1, cloud infrastructure revenue came in at $3.3 billion, up 54% year-on-year. Catz said: Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads. We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who's who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, NVIDIA, AMD and many others...Clearly, it was an excellent quarter and demand for Oracle Cloud infrastructure continues to build. I expect we will sign additional multi-billion-dollar customers and that RPO will likely grow to exceed $0.5 trillion. For his part, Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, heading for a half-century since he co-founded the firm, it's a time of transformation: Eventually, AI will change everything. But right now, AI is fundamentally transforming Oracle and the rest of the computer industry, though not everyone fully grasp the extent of the tsunami that is approaching. Well, we seem a long way from recent years when Wall Street had a regular fit of the vapors because Catz and Ellison's re-imagining of Oracle around the cloud was taking longer than their short termist thinking could deal with on a quarterly basis. To all those nervous Nellies, all that can be said is, read it and weep - then cash the check! And as the firm approaches that all-important half-century anniversary, there's still more to come. Oracle has been a master of re-invention and adaptability over the decades, never repeating the error of Cullinet, the one-time 'Oracle' of the heirarchical database world whose King Canute-like refusal to embrace relational tech destroyed it and cleared the way for Oracle. Larry learns lessons is the lesson I learned a long time ago. Those who didn't learned a far harder one... So with Oracle AI World around the corner now, what can we expect? Ellison dropped some hints: A lot of companies are saying, we're big into AI because we're writing agents. Well, guess what, we're writing a bunch of agents, too. But when they introduced ChatGPT almost three years ago, what you got to do is have a conversation and ask questions. You weren't automating some process with an agent. You could ask whatever question you wanted to ask and get a well-reasoned answer with all of the latest and best information and high-quality reason go along with it. Who's offering that to customers? We'll be the first when we deliver it and demonstrate it at AI World next month. Derek du Preez and Jon Reed will be on the ground at AI World in Las Vegas next month to bring all the news and analysis from the event.

Oracle expects half a trillion dollars in booked cloud orders, stock rises 27%

Sept 9 (Reuters) - Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab said on Tuesday it expects booked revenue at its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business to exceed half a trillion dollars, boosted by growing demand for its relatively low-cost cloud infrastructure services and sending its shares up 27% after the bell. The company's remaining performance obligations, or RPO, the most popular measure of booked revenue, jumped 359% to $455 billion in the first quarter, ended August 31. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Oracle, whose shares have risen over 107% so far this year, forecast OCI revenue growth of 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year, and on to $144 billion over the subsequent four years. "Enterprises are clearly eager for cost-effective AI cloud tools, and Oracle is positioning itself to capture that demand," said eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne. Oracle offers integrated cloud technologies along with flexible deployment models, enabling it to meet a range of customer demands. "We made it very easy for our customers to directly connect all their databases ... to the world's most advanced AI reasoning models -- ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, all of which are uniquely available in the Oracle Cloud," Catz said on a post-earnings call. Even though it is a smaller player, "both current and forecast numbers show that Oracle's investment in infrastructure is continuing to pay off as large organizations look to Oracle Cloud to support their AI initiatives," said Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir. It has struck deals with Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab for OCI to run inside their respective cloud infrastructure. Revenue from these clients grew 1,529% in the first quarter. "We expect MultiCloud revenue to grow substantially every quarter for several years as we deliver another 37 datacenters to our three hyperscaler partners, for a total of 71," Chairman Larry Ellison said. "By offering integrated solutions across various environments, Oracle is not just keeping up but actually leading the way in the cloud space. This could attract even more businesses looking for versatile cloud options," according to Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global's Visible Alpha. Oracle also said it had signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the first quarter, helping a 12% increase in revenue to $14.93 billion. For the second quarter, Oracle expects total revenue to grow 12% to 14%, while it sees cloud revenue growth between 32% to 36%. Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

The AI Trade Picks Up Steam After Oracle's 'Truly Historic' Quarter

Wall Street analysts expressed shock on Oracle's earnings call Tuesday, with one calling the company's growth forecasts "truly historic." The artificial intelligence trade got a shot of adrenaline on Wednesday after results from database software and cloud provider Oracle suggested the AI spending bonanza has ample room to run. Oracle (ORCL) on Tuesday reported its backlog swelled to $455 billion, a 359% year-over-year increase, after it signed four multibillion-dollar cloud deals in the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year. Executives said the backlog is expected to surpass half a trillion as Oracle inks more big deals in the coming months. Oracle also forecast cloud revenue would grow from an estimated $18 billion this fiscal year to $144 billion in 2030, about $50 billion more than Wall Street had forecast. Oracle said most of that revenue forecast was already reflected in its backlog, giving some investors greater confidence in the numbers. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Oracle had signed a five-year contract worth $300 billion with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Oracle's projections completely overshadowed lackluster first-quarter results, and sent its shares soaring as much as 43% on Wednesday. The rising tide of robust AI spending was lifting plenty of boats on Wednesday. Shares of AI chip giants Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO) were recently up more than 4% and 9%, respectively, while chip design company Arm Holdings (ARM) surged more than 8%. The PHLX Semiconductor Index (SOX) was up about 2%. Data center infrastructure provider Vertiv Holdings (VRT) jumped about 9%, while power generators Vistra (VST) and Constellation Energy (CEG) advanced 8% and 6%, respectively. Oracle's major cloud competitors were the only drag on the AI trade on Wednesday. Amazon (AMZN) declined more than 3%, while Meta Platforms (META) dropped nearly 2%. Alphabet (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) ticked higher. Wall Street's ebullience over the results was first visible on Oracle's earnings call Tuesday night. "Even I'm sort of blown away by what this looks like going forward," said Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci at the top of the question and answer portion of the call. "I tell my team, 'Pay attention to this' -- even those that are not working on Oracle -- 'because this is a career event happening right now," DiFucci added. "There's no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up," said Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick. Others called the quarter "momentous" and the backlog growth "truly historic." AI investments have been driven by what many have characterized as insatiable demand for training and inference, and Oracle's results appeared to support that assessment. On Oracle's earnings call, co-founder and chair Larry Ellison said an unnamed company had requested all of Oracle's available inferencing capacity. "I'd never gotten a call like that," Ellison said. Big Tech's investment in capacity to meet that demand is expected to remain robust in the coming years, supported by healthy cash flows at the biggest cloud providers and supportive tax incentives. Cloud providers like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon have been key drivers of the AI infrastructure trade in recent years. Hyperscalers are expected to spend a cumulative $368 billion on infrastructure this year, with much of that earmarked for data centers and the chips and servers that fill them, according to Goldman Sachs. Oracle on Tuesday forecast capital expenditures of $35 billion in the 12 months through May 2026, about $10 billion more than the figure executives gave as a minimum last quarter. Tax incentives written into the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act should also support AI infrastructure investment. Morgan Stanley expects the bill's immediate capital investment depreciation provisions to boost Big Tech's free cash flows by nearly $50 billion this year. The firm expects a sizable portion of those tax savings to be spent on AI infrastructure.

ET Explainer: How Oracle became the new Nvidia amid AI cloud surge - The Economic Times

Oracle's stock experienced a significant 36% surge following the announcement of multi-billion-dollar AI cloud deals, including a substantial $300 billion agreement with OpenAI. This surge, the largest since 1992, briefly elevated Larry Ellison to the world's richest person.On September 10, Oracle announced a series of multi-billion-dollar deals in AI cloud. This move led to a 36% surge in its shares, the largest one-day gain since 1992. Among them is a $300 billion, five-year deal with OpenAI, which is a part of an ongoing pipeline of deals involving major tech companies such as Nvidia, Softbank, and Meta. The one-day surge was of such a magnitude that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison briefly overtook Elon Musk as the world's richest person. With a substantial long-term revenue outlook and high growth projections, Oracle is having a comeback as a major player in the AI ecosystem. Why did Oracle's stock surge recently? Oracle's shares increased by 36% on September 10, leading to the biggest single-day gain since 1992. This surge is an aftermath of the company's announcement of several multibillion-dollar AI cloud infrastructure deals, including one with OpenAI. Also Read: Explained: What's behind the Oracle rally What are the deals about? The most significant deal is a $300 billion, five-year deal with OpenAI, one of the biggest cloud computing agreements ever. Oracle will offer the computing resources and cloud infrastructure required to support OpenAI's plans. Nvidia, SoftBank, xAI, and Meta are some of the other important clients. What is Oracle's backlog, and does it matter? The backlog of finalised contracts was $455 billion, four times as much as last year. With deals closing, CEO Safra Catz expects it to cross $500 billion. This backlog is an assurance of long-term revenue for investors. Why is this important? Oracle now competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in AI infrastructure, with all the deals. Despite Oracle not meeting quarterly revenue projections, investors show confidence in its long-term growth. What does this mean for the whole AI ecosystem? Oracle is one of the biggest providers of AI infrastructure for the top firms, which could allow global AI adoption by offering high-power and reliable cloud computing for advanced AI models to businesses and startups.

Oracle 'Will Reshape Industries And Change The World': Gene Munster On What OpenAI Deal Means - Oracle (NYSE:ORCL)

Gene Munster says Oracle Corp's ORCL $300 billion deal with OpenAI highlights just how early the company -- and others -- are in the AI race, sending shares soaring last week despite a quarterly report that missed Street estimates. Oracle's Historic Contract A surge in Oracle's stock price briefly cemented co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison as the richest person in the world. While the title was short-lived, Munster, a managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, says Oracle's $300 billion contract with OpenAI "cements" the company's position as an AI "hyperscaler." "The deal underscores just how early we are in AI, and how massive the infrastructure layer will prove to be," Munster said. "That foundation will power AI-native companies, which in turn will reshape industries and change the world." Munster said Oracle is no longer just a tech stock benefitting from cloud growth, and that the OpenAI contract makes the company a key AI infrastructure player. The OpenAI deal is part of Oracle's $455 billion in remaining performance obligations for AI workloads. This number was up 359% year-over-year and more than double that of analyst estimates. The deal and backlog have changed how investors view Oracle, according to Munster. "Investors now see a multiyear growth profile tied to AI workloads anchored by OpenAI's massive, long-term commitment." The backlog and AI growth is not without risk, Munster says, as Oracle is now more reliant on one customer. Read Also: Oracle Stock Rockets On $455 Billion Revenue Pipeline: Here's What Wall Street Is Buzzing About AI Growth Still Early Munster said the new Oracle, OpenAI tie-up shows that AI infrastructure could be in the early phases. "After June earnings I revised my view that we were in the second inning. I'm now debating if we're in the first inning," Munster said of the AI buildout. Munster said that it's likely that the AI buildout should have increased growth rates "for the next few years." "The size of Oracle's backlog highlights that AI demand is stretching beyond available supply and mind-blowing levels." The investor said expectations continue to increase for AI investment, which means companies that are AI hyperscalers could see increased backlogs and guidance. Oracle Stock Price Action Oracle stock is up 2% to $298 on Monday versus a 52-week trading range of $118.86 to $345.72. Oracle stock is up 79.7% year-to-date in 2025. Read Next: If You Invested $1,000 In Oracle Stock At IPO, Here's How Much You'd Have Today Image: Shutterstock ORCLOracle Corp$299.102.37%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum94.03Growth66.07QualityN/AValue8.67Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Oracle Q1 Earnings: Ellison Says AI Inferencing Fuels Company's Monster Pipeline

'People are running out of inferencing capacity,' Oracle CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison said. Oracle missed expectations for its latest quarterly performance but blew away analysts with $455 billion in remaining performance obligations and a forecast that it will exceed $500 billion in RPO over the next few months in a signal that there is money to be made in artificial intelligence inferencing-and, perhaps, a shot at enterprise application vendors not yet seeing AI translate into meaningful revenue. The Austin, Texas-based cloud and database products vendor shared that RPO-the value of contracted services that haven't yet been delivered to customers-during its earnings call Tuesday covering the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year. The quarter ended Aug. 31. Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Larry Ellison pointed to AI inferencing-when an AI model generates data-as a driver for the large amount of revenue his company is expected to take in. "People are running out of inferencing capacity," Ellison said on the call. "In the end, all this money we're spending on (AI model) training is going to have to be translated into products that are sold, which is all inferencing. And the inferencing market, again, is much larger than the training market." [RELATED: What Salesforce's Q2 Says About Enterprise Software In The AI Era] Oracle Q1 Oracle's NetSuite division is part of CRN's 2025 Partner Program Guide. CEO Safra Catz added that Oracle doesn't own the building and property, helping keep the cost of that revenue down. Oracle owns and engineers the equipment optimized for Oracle Cloud. "I know some of our competitors, they like to own buildings," Catz said. "That's not really our specialty. Our specialty is the unique technology, the unique networking, the storage, just the whole way we put these systems together." Oracle expects about $35 billion in capital expenditures for the fiscal year. "If it is higher, it's good news, because it means more capacity," she said. AI App Generators Ellison told listeners on Tuesday's call that Oracle has leveraged AI to build new applications and no longer needs the same number of employees. "The latest applications that we are building, we're not building them," he said. "They're being generated by AI. And we think we're far, far ahead of any of the other application companies. ... We don't charge separately for our AI and our applications because our applications are AI. They're entirely AI. The new ones-the new ones that we're building-they're nothing other than a bunch of AI agents that we generate, that are linked together with Workflow (Oracle's business process automation management system). That's all they are." Oracle has separated itself from AI competitors through its databases that vectorize data, secure the data and link to the popular AI models "to deliver a ChatGPT-like experience on top of your data as well as publicly available data," Ellison said. The Oracle co-founder explained that his company has millions of customer databases compared to the tens of thousands application vendors hold. He didn't explicitly reference any enterprise app vendors, although later in the call he pointed out that Oracle is larger than ServiceNow and Workday. "We're better positioned than anybody to take advantage of inferencing," he said. Oracle still needs employees, "but the number of people we need is substantially less, and we can build slash generate much better applications than we can hand build." Oracle's Cloud Business Catz said on the call that Oracle's cloud business continues to grow alongside the AI business, with AI appetite fueling customers' Oracle database migrations to the cloud. Fueling that business growth includes Oracle's dedicated cloud region option, its products across the technology stack and its partnerships with other cloud vendors to provide customers with more choice. "We have become the de facto cloud for many of our customers," she said. Oracle has gotten its cloud offer down to three racks available for $6 million, Ellison said. Competing cloud vendor offers can reach 500 times that amount. Oracle customers have sought a cloud experience without needing to share space with other companies. Q1 In Detail The vendor's total revenue for the quarter was $14.9 billion, up 11 percent year on year ignoring foreign exchange. Wall Street was expecting $15 billion. Cloud revenue, which Oracle counts as infrastructure-as-a-service plus software-as-a-service was $7.2 billion, up 27 percent ignoring foreign exchange. IaaS was $3.3 billion, up 54 percent year on year. SaaS was $3.8 billion, up 10 percent year on year. Oracle's software revenue fell 2 percent ignoring foreign exchange, coming in at $5.7 billion. The Fusion Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) revenue grew 16 percent year on year ignoring foreign exchange to $1 billion. NetSuite Cloud ERP revenue was the same amount at a similar percent growth. Oracle's operating income using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) was $4.3 billion. GAAP net income was $2.9 billion. Oracle saw operating cash flow of $21.5 billion over the past 12 months, up 13 percent year on year in U.S. dollars. The vendor is taking up its expected revenue from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to 77 percent growth year on year to $18 billion for the fiscal year. Oracle expects OCI revenue to then hit $32 billion the following year, then $73 billion the year after, $114 billion and then $144 billion in four years. Multicloud database revenue from the hyperscalers of Amazon, Google and Microsoft was 16 times the amount from a year ago, according to Oracle. Oracle's stock was up 26 percent after the market closed Tuesday, trading at about $305 a share.

Oracle Had a 'Brilliant' Quarter, CEO Says. Its Stock Is Popping on AI Demand

Kara Greenberg is a senior news editor for Investopedia, where she does work writing, editing, and assigning daily markets and investing news. Prior to joining Investopedia, Kara was a researcher and editor at The Wire. Earlier in her career, she worked in financial compliance and due diligence at Loomis, Sayles & Company, and The Bank of New York Mellon. Oracle shares soared in late trading Tuesday after the cloud computing giant said it added several large new clients and boosted its outlook for cloud infrastructure sales on booming AI demand. Shares of Oracle (ORCL) were up over 25% in after-hours trading. The stock has added close to half of its value in 2025 through Tuesday's close, with most of the gains coming after the company posted strong quarterly results in June. Oracle on Tuesday said it now sees cloud infrastructure sales jumping 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year as AI demand grows, up from a June forecast of more than 70%. And that figure could surge to $144 billion over the next four years, CEO Safra Catz said. "We expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers," in the coming months, Catz said, after a "brilliant start" to its new fiscal year with four multibillion-dollar contracts signed in the quarter ended in August. Oracle posted adjusted earnings per share of $1.47 in the fiscal first quarter on revenue that rose 12% year-over-year to $14.9 billion. Both figures were slightly below Wall Street analysts' estimates as compiled by Visible Alpha. Oracle said its growing backlog from new contracts contributed to its more robust outlook, and Catz said the company intends to offer more details on its financial plan at an event scheduled for next month. Co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said the company also plans to use the event to unveil a new service called "Oracle AI Database" that will allow customers to use top AI models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, and Google's Gemini, on top of the Oracle Database to analyze their data. Ellison said he expects Oracle's AI offerings to support "dramatically" larger cloud demand and consumption in the years to come, adding "AI changes everything."

Prediction: This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Company Will Reshape Cloud Infrastructure by 2030 | The Motley Fool

The company's focus on cloud and AI has unlocked unprecedented growth. The advent of modern cloud computing is largely attributed to Amazon, which pioneered cloud infrastructure services with the introduction of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The industry has evolved over time, but the basics remain the same: Providers offer on-demand, scalable computing, software, data storage, and networking capabilities to any business with an internet connection. After a period of slower growth, the cloud infrastructure space got a jump start thanks to recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). However, the large language models that underpin the technology require a great deal of computational horsepower, which typically isn't available outside a data center. As a result, the demand for cloud infrastructure services has skyrocketed in recent years, and it's expected only to grow from here. Recent developments suggest there could be a big shakeup coming to the cloud infrastructure space, led by technology stalwart Oracle (ORCL -5.05%). While the company is primarily known for its flagship Oracle Database, it offers customers a growing suite of enterprise software, integrated cloud applications, and cloud infrastructure services. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has long trailed the Big Three cloud providers. To close out the calendar second quarter, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alphabet's Google Cloud controlled 30%, 20%, and 13% of the market, respectively, according to data compiled by Statista. Oracle ran a distant fifth with 3% of the market. Yet, recent developments suggest a paradigm shift in the status quo. When Oracle released the results of its fiscal 2026 first quarter (ended Aug. 31), the headline numbers were largely business as usual. Total revenue grew 11% year over year to $14.9 billion, while its adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.47 grew 6%. However, investors were taken aback by the magnitude of Oracle's backlog, as its remaining performance obligation (RPO) -- or contractual obligations not yet included in revenue -- surged 359% year over year to $455 billion. Perhaps more impressive is the $317 billion in contracts signed during the first quarter alone. Oracle's position as a trusted partner to enterprise made it "the go-to place for AI workloads," according to CEO Safra Catz. If that wasn't enough, she went on to say, "We expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars." Breaking down that backlog shows that Oracle will be reaping the benefit of those deals for years to come: The company notes that the majority of the revenue in this outlook is already booked in RPO, so there are contracts backing these forecasts. If Oracle is able to reach these lofty benchmarks, and that's still a big if, OCI will join the big leagues of cloud infrastructure and could potentially unseat one or more of the Big Three. As previously stated, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google top the list of cloud infrastructure providers, so it helps to see where they stand. During the first six months of 2025, AWS generated revenue of $60.1 billion, up 17%, suggesting a run rate of $120 billion. During the same period, Google Cloud's revenue came in at $25.9 billion, up 30%, suggesting a run rate of about $51.8 billion. Microsoft doesn't generally break out Azure's revenue, but it recently revealed that for fiscal 2025 (ended June 30), Azure surpassed $75 billion in revenue, up 34%. Given the limitations, this is obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it provides us with a starting point. Taking these extrapolated figures and applying their most recent growth rates over the coming four years, here's where the Big Three would stand by the end of calendar 2029 compared to Oracle: Using our imperfect information and assuming Oracle can turn its RPO into cloud revenue, this exercise shows a path for OCI to mount a challenge to the Big Three over the next five years. To be clear, this is fun with numbers, and life doesn't occur in a vacuum. All of our cloud infrastructure providers will likely grow more quickly or more slowly than our examples suggest. One of the upstart neocloud providers could capture an outsize portion of the market. There are plenty of other examples of what could go very right or very wrong, but you get the idea. The recent surge in Oracle's stock price has had a commensurate impact on its valuation, which appears lofty at first glance. The stock is selling for 38 times next year's earnings, which is certainly a premium. However, using the more appropriate forward price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio, which accounts for the company's growth trajectory, the multiple comes in at 0.8, when any number less than 1 is the standard for an undervalued stock.

oracle: Oracle on cloud nine, AI bets paying off - The Economic Times

Oracle is making a significant push into the AI sector by leasing its cloud infrastructure, a move that briefly elevated Larry Ellison to the world's wealthiest individual. Unlike competitors, Oracle avoids the chatbot race, betting instead on providing essential resources to AI companies like OpenAI.Oracle just crashed into the AI party, not by tweaking the technology but by renting out its cloud computing infrastructure. The surge in the database company's stock briefly made its owner, Larry Ellison, the world's richest man. His wealth surged to $393 bn on Wednesday, surpassing Elon Musk's $385 bn, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Oracle is now betting the farm on AI, pumping more money than it ever has into data centres to offer cloud computing and storage solutions to clients like OpenAI. In this, it joins Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft that are scaling up cloud infrastructure. Unlike them, Oracle is not getting into the battle of bots, which makes its bet dependent on OpenAI's delivery, now in an intense phase of cash burn. Other AI companies are also struggling with their LLMs. Nvidia is providing shovels and Oracle is offering canteens to AI panhandlers. Now it's a waiting game for whether this will be a flash in the pan. AI is expected to require enormous computing power to do exactly what nobody quite has a fix on. Consumers are underwhelmed with the available chatbots, and companies find them unusable. Investors don't seem too concerned, though, and AI valuations' party rages on. Oracle did report sedate numbers along with its eye-popping projections, yet its stock zoomed past its dotcom-era surge. The company was fairly grounded until it made its estimate of cloud infrastructure revenue, which effectively hangs a number on the AI business down the line. Being Oracle, that number carries credibility. Saner voices are emerging in the AI race. Apple is downplaying its AI promise after initial delivery. The company can afford to let the software firms slug it out while it works on its hardware. That sits well with its vendor model, which should apply when AI victors emerge. For the rest, though, AI will remain an investment treadmill. Oracle just got on it-but it needs to know when to get off.

Why Oracle Is a No-Brainer Growth Play Now | The Motley Fool

Oracle's stock just surged 30% overnight as Wall Street realizes this isn't your father's database company anymore. Oracle (ORCL 35.96%) just delivered something extraordinary -- a quarterly earnings miss that sent its stock soaring 30% in after-hours trading. The company reported non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.47, compared to estimates of $1.48 and revenue of $14.9 billion versus the expected $15 billion. Yet instead of grilling management about the shortfall, Wall Street analysts used words like "blown away," "momentous," and "in shock" in a very good way." Why would professional analysts react this way to disappointing numbers? Oracle just unveiled a growth trajectory that rewrites everything investors thought they knew about this 48-year-old enterprise software giant. The company's artificial intelligence (AI) initiative is quickly becoming the picks-and-shovels provider for the entire AI revolution. Here's why this software giant just became a no-brainer growth play. Oracle's cloud infrastructure (OCI) revenue is set to reach $18 billion in fiscal 2026, up 77% year over year from $10 billion. That growth rate exceeds what Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, or Alphabet's Google Cloud achieved at comparable revenue scales. But here's where it gets truly shocking: Management projects OCI revenue will hit $32 billion by fiscal 2027, then $73 billion, $114 billion, and finally $144 billion by fiscal 2030. These aren't pie-in-the-sky projections from an overeager start-up. Oracle's remaining performance obligations -- essentially its contract backlog -- exploded 359% year over year to $455 billion. When you have nearly half-a-trillion dollars in committed future revenue, growth projections become less speculation and more mathematical certainty. While AWS and Azure fight for market dominance, Oracle chose cooperation over competition. The company's multicloud database revenue -- running Oracle services on competitors' clouds -- skyrocketed 1,529% year over year. Oracle plans to add 37 new data centers through partnerships with hyperscalers, bringing its total to 71 locations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This strategy is brilliant. Instead of trying to convince enterprises to abandon their existing cloud providers, Oracle brings its database and AI services directly to where customers already operate. It's capturing growth without requiring painful migrations or vendor switches. The approach has secured multibillion-dollar AI contracts with OpenAI and Meta, along with deep infrastructure partnerships with Nvidia that embed its graphics processing units (GPUs) into Oracle's cloud at massive scale. Oracle is committing $35 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2026, a 65% increase, to build AI-ready infrastructure. The company's upcoming Oracle AI Database will let customers integrate leading AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok directly with their Oracle databases. This positions Oracle as the connective tissue between enterprise data and the AI revolution. Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick captured the moment perfectly: "There's no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results." Oracle isn't competing for scraps in the traditional database market anymore. It's positioning itself as essential infrastructure for the $500 billion AI market projected by decade's end. Oracle's stock has surged over 30% since the earnings announcement, marking its biggest rally since the dot-com boom. The company's market cap has swelled past $870 billion as investors rush to price in the explosive growth trajectory. While the surge has pushed Oracle's valuation higher in the near term, the massive $455 billion backlog and path to $144 billion in cloud revenue by 2030 suggest the market is finally recognizing Oracle's transformation from database vendor to AI infrastructure powerhouse. Oracle has successfully reframed its narrative from legacy database vendor to AI infrastructure powerhouse. With locked-in contracts, aggressive expansion plans, and a multicloud strategy that sidesteps competitive battles, the company offers investors something rare: hypergrowth backed by half-a-trillion dollars in committed revenue. For investors seeking exposure to AI infrastructure without the froth of speculative start-ups, Oracle has become the no-brainer choice.

Oracle hovers near $1 trillion valuation on AI-driven gains; shares down 2%

Oracle's shares dipped slightly on Thursday, following a record-breaking surge in the previous session driven by strong gains in the company's AI cloud business. Oracle's shares dipped slightly on Thursday, following a record-breaking surge in the previous session driven by strong gains in the company's AI cloud business. The enterprise software maker's remarkable rise, fueled by a wave of multi-billion-dollar cloud deals, puts the spotlight on the scramble for computing power from companies that are pouring billions to become leaders in the AI race. "Oracle lit a fire under the rekindled AI trade," said Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, adding that the company's multi-billion-dollar demand outlook has triggered a "ripple effect" for AI-related stocks. The Wall Street Journal also reported on Wednesday that OpenAI has signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle for computing power, among the biggest in history, likely accounting for the bulk of the new revenue Oracle outlined on Tuesday. Oracle's shares were down 2.2% in early trading after climbing as much as 35.9% on Wednesday. The company's market valuation had risen to a record $933 billion, as of last close. The stock has nearly doubled in value this year, making it among the top performers in the S&P 500 index, trouncing gains made by the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks. Co-founder Ellison saw his net worth soar by nearly $100 billion to $392.6 billion, largely driven by his 41% stake in Oracle, compared with Tesla CEO Musk's $439.9 billion fortune that still tops Forbes' global wealth rankings. Oracle's shares were trading at a premium compared to its cloud services peers. Their 12-month forward price-to-earnings multiple was 45.3, compared to Amazon's 31.3 and Microsoft's 31.

Oracle nears $1tn valuation, Ellison edges toward richest-person title

Image: Getty Images Oracle's shares rose on Thursday, extending a record run from the previous session and boosting stocks across the tech sector, as the company moves closer to the trillion-dollar club on soaring gains from its AI cloud business. The enterprise software maker's remarkable rise, fuelled by a wave of multi-billion-dollar cloud deals, highlights the scramble for computing power as companies pour billions into becoming leaders in the AI race. The stock's gains also position Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison on track to surpass Elon Musk, currently the world's richest man. "Oracle lit a fire under the rekindled AI trade," said Richard Hunter, head of markets at Interactive Investor, noting that the company's multi-billion-dollar demand outlook has triggered a "ripple effect" for AI-related stocks. OpenAI signs deal with Oracle The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that OpenAI has signed a $300bn deal with Oracle for computing power, one of the largest contracts in history, likely accounting for the bulk of the new revenue Oracle outlined on Tuesday. Oracle's shares were last up 1.5 per cent in premarket trading after climbing as much as 35.9 per cent on Wednesday, lifting the company's market valuation to a record $933bn at the last close. The stock has nearly doubled in value this year, making it one of the top performers in the S&P 500 and outpacing gains by the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks. Co-founder Ellison saw his net worth rise by nearly $100bn to $392.6bn, largely due to his 41 per cent stake in Oracle, compared with Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $439.9bn fortune, which still tops Forbes' global wealth rankings. Oracle's shares are trading Oracle's shares are trading at a premium compared to its cloud services peers, with a 12-month forward price-to-earnings multiple of 45.3, versus Amazon's 31.3 and Microsoft's 31. Read: Oracle pledges $14bn investment in Saudi Arabia

Oracle stock soars 40% as it projects half a trillion dollars in...

Oracle shares surged nearly 40% Wednesday - on track for its best day since 1999 - on jaw-dropping projections that the software giant will reap half a trillion dollars in the future from its AI business. In the first quarter, Oracle signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three separate customers, CEO Safra Catz said in an earnings release on Tuesday. "We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who's who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta and many others," Catz said during a call with investors after the earnings report. Those deals pushed Oracle's Remaining Performance Obligations - or future revenue it will deliver based on contracts - up 359% to $455 billion. Oracle expects to sign several more multibillion-dollar contracts, and for its RPO to exceed half a trillion dollars, Catz said. The stock surge positioned Larry Ellison, 81, who co-founded Oracle and now serves as chairman, within spitting distance of overtaking Elon Musk, the world's richest person with a net worth of $384 billion. Ellison owns about 1.16 billion shares of Oracle, and is on track to see a record-breaking gain of roughly $90 billion if Tuesday's stock holds - more than any human has ever made in a single day. The software company has made its fortune by stockpiling a massive supply of Nvidia AI chips and renting out its computing power through its cloud business to tech giants like Amazon and Google. It expects its cloud revenue to jump to $144 billion by its 2030 fiscal year - a massive jump from its projection of less than $20 billion in its current fiscal year. "We expect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year - and then increase to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion over the subsequent four years," Catz said Tuesday. Like many others in the industry, Oracle has funneled billions of dollars into its AI investments. To save on costs, the company has laid off workers and reportedly discussed eliminating raises and bonuses for employees this year. Oracle saw its stock roar full-steam ahead despite reporting earnings that slightly missed estimates on Tuesday. It reported revenue of $14.9 billion in the first quarter, slightly below projections of $15 billion, and adjusted earnings per share of $1.47, which missed estimates of $1.48. Capital expenditures will jump to roughly $35 billion in 2026, up from previous estimates of around $25 billion for the year, the company added. In June, Oracle said it had clinched a new deal set to bring in over $30 billion in annual revenue starting in its 2028 fiscal year. Several media outlets reported the customer was OpenAI. Ellison's software giant is also involved in Stargate, a massive $500 billion AI infrastructure deal involving OpenAI and SoftBank that President Trump unveiled at the White House in January. Stargate, which was created to ramp up AI data center construction in the US, has sharply scaled back its short-term plans as its partners have struggled to complete deals, the Wall Street Journal reported in July.

Oracle Share Price Jumps 9.14% to ₹9,182 After Strong Q1 Results

Analysts point out that this momentum is part of a broader rally, with Oracle shares climbing over 70% in the past year. The surge is largely fueled by its aggressive expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure. During the, CEO Safra Catz announced that Oracle expects its AI-driven cloud revenue to soar to $144 billion (₹12 lakh crore) by fiscal 2030, a massive leap from less than $20 billion in the current fiscal year. Much of this projected revenue is already accounted for in its remaining performance obligations (RPO), which skyrocketed 359% year-on-year to $455 billion in Q1. Catz also highlighted the signing of four multi-billion-dollar contracts in Q1, suggesting that Oracle's backlog could soon surpass half a trillion dollars. Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison added that Oracle's MultiCloud database1,529% in Q1. He revealed plans to launch Oracle AI Database, which will let customers run models like Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and xAI's Grok directly on Oracle's database. This service, he emphasized, would unlock massive value for enterprises already storing vast amounts of data with Oracle. Also Read:

Oracle's AI-Driven Growth Calls for an Overhaul of Traditional Valuation Metrics | Investing.com UK

The ground just shifted under Wall Street's feet, and the old valuation compasses are spinning wildly. Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), the grizzled veteran of Silicon Valley, suddenly erupted like a dormant volcano that everyone assumed had gone cold. In the space of a single earnings call, a company written off as yesterday's news morphed into a frontline AI infrastructure play, leaving the sell-side gasping for air. For decades, "Ivory Tower" analysts have sworn by the same navigational charts: discounted cash flows, forward P/E ratios, earnings multiples. They've used these tools like sextants on the open sea. But now, the waves of artificial intelligence are swelling in non-linear surges -- currents that defy the linear assumptions baked into those models. Oracle's sudden 36% melt-up isn't just about one stock; it's about the broader realization that Wall Street's cartography is out of date. Larry Ellison, the old sea-dog at the wheel, pointed the ship toward "AI inference" -- taking pre-trained models and embedding them into the daily workflows of global enterprise. That's not speculative vaporware; it's practical monetization, and it slots directly into Oracle's bread-and-butter business. Contracts are piling up like container ships outside a crowded port -- $455 billion in obligations, four times last year's tally. The old guard, with their price targets and tidy spreadsheets, never saw it coming despite 47 sets of "coverage." It's like being a weatherman who misses a hurricane because the instruments don't measure storms of this new magnitude. The bigger issue isn't just the stock. Its credibility. If analysts keep low-balling the earnings power of companies tied to the AI boom, their numbers lose meaning. Multiples -- the bedrock of equity valuation -- crumble into sand when the market stops believing in the anchor. What's the point of a forward P/E if forward itself is impossible to define? The market starts discarding the map and sailing by instinct, a dangerous but inevitable adaptation. This is déjà vu from the dot-com days, when Oracle itself rode an 80% plunge after the bubble burst. Back then, it was easy to dismiss wild multiples as froth. But today, the AI revolution is already laying track -- every enterprise CIO is under pressure to board the train before it leaves the station. The adoption rate may be only 10% economy-wide, but the marginal buyer is already willing to pay monopoly-tax valuations for companies like OpenAI. That soft $500 billion private valuation is less a price tag than a declaration that valuation orthodoxy is a relic. So where does this leave the market? The traditional spreadsheet math -- neat rows of projected earnings -- can't capture the convexity of technological leaps. When disruption arrives in quantum jumps rather than arithmetic progressions, the models must evolve. The option-pricing lens -- treating every AI platform like a call option on the unknown upside -- might finally graduate from the ivory tower into the analyst playbook. Because ignoring the blue-sky optionality is no longer conservative; it's malpractice. In the end, Oracle's eruption is a reminder that we're entering an era where the old anchors of valuation are breaking free. The market is adrift in a sea of technological unknowns, and the only certainty is that yesterday's tools won't steer tomorrow's trades. The charts need redrawing. The compass needs recalibration. And investors who don't adapt will find themselves navigating with broken instruments, while those who recognize the new cartography may discover entire continents of value hiding just beyond the visible horizon.

Is Oracle having its Nvidia moment? AI frenzy makes Larry Ellison the richest man alive -- but can it last, or is this 1999 all over again?

Oracle has just staged one of the most dramatic rallies Wall Street has seen in years, with its stock jumping more than 40% in a single day -- the biggest surge in the company's history. That record-breaking leap instantly added over $250 billion to its market value, making co-founder Larry Ellison the richest person in the world, overtaking Elon Musk. Investors are now asking the obvious question: Is this Oracle's "Nvidia moment" in the AI boom? What makes the rally striking is that it wasn't powered by a blockbuster earnings report. In fact, Oracle missed Wall Street's revenue and profit forecasts this quarter. The excitement instead came from a bold projection: cloud infrastructure revenue climbing to $18 billion by 2026 and an eye-popping $144 billion by 2030. Add in four new multi-billion-dollar contracts and a 359% jump in outstanding contract revenue, and suddenly Oracle looks like an unexpected heavyweight in the race to power artificial intelligence. But this surge also comes with familiar echoes of 1999, when Oracle's stock soared nearly 600% during the dot-com bubble before crashing back to earth. Today's bet hinges on AI players like OpenAI, which remains unprofitable and faces staggering projected cash burn. If those customers can't deliver, Oracle's lofty outlook may prove fragile. The stakes go beyond Oracle itself -- with data centers now driving U.S. economic growth, the AI buildout is shaping up to be one of the biggest economic gambles of this decade. Surprisingly, it wasn't a blowout earnings report. Oracle actually missed Wall Street's revenue and profit estimates for the quarter. Instead, the rally was fueled by a jaw-dropping AI growth outlook. CEO Safra Catz projected Oracle's cloud infrastructure revenue would soar 77% to $18 billion by 2026, and then rocket to $144 billion by 2030. Oracle also revealed it had signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three customers, pushing its outstanding contract revenue to $455 billion -- up 359% from a year ago. That kind of growth forecast stunned Wall Street. Some analysts compared it to Nvidia's breakout moment, when investors realized the chipmaker had become the engine of the AI revolution. For years, Oracle was best known for its database software and slow-moving enterprise contracts. But in 2025, it has quietly repositioned itself as the infrastructure backbone of AI companies, including OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT. Think of it this way: Nvidia sells the chips (the picks and shovels of AI), while Oracle rents out the digital real estate (the cloud servers and storage). That positioning has investors treating Oracle less like an old-school software vendor and more like a critical piece of the AI gold rush supply chain. The comparison isn't perfect, though. Nvidia sells to a broad universe of customers. Oracle's biggest bet is tied to a handful of AI firms, most notably OpenAI, which is still losing money and projected to burn through $115 billion by 2029, according to The Information. That dependency introduces real risk. Oracle has seen this kind of euphoria before. During the dot-com boom of 1999, the stock rocketed nearly 600% in a single year before crashing back down in the early 2000s. By early 2000, Oracle's market value briefly approached half a trillion dollars, making it one of the world's most valuable companies at the time. Critics warn the current surge has shades of that same era. Oracle's capital spending has ballooned to $35 billion this year -- 52% of revenue, compared with just 13% in 2024. For a company once prized for strong cash flow, this shift into hyper-expansion mode is uncharted territory. Peter Boockvar of One Point BFG Wealth Partners put it bluntly: "When I see market cap increases of this scale in a single day, I can't help but think of 1999." The biggest risk is that its anchor customer, OpenAI, fails to turn its enormous hype into sustainable profits. If OpenAI stumbles, the revenue projections underpinning Oracle's $455 billion contracts could collapse. That risk isn't limited to Oracle. The entire U.S. tech sector -- and even GDP growth -- is now being propped up by massive data center buildouts. These are multi-hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure projects, and Oracle has become one of the most aggressive spenders in the field. If demand for generative AI fizzles, it won't just be Oracle shareholders left exposed. The ripple effects could hit cloud providers, chipmakers, utilities, and even government policy tied to AI infrastructure expansion.

Oracle's $244 billion single-day rally as big as entire IT trinity of TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech - The Economic Times

Oracle's shares surged by 36%, adding $244 billion to its market cap after projecting substantial cloud infrastructure revenue growth, potentially reaching $144 billion by fiscal 2030. This rally briefly elevated Larry Ellison's wealth, nearing Elon Musk's.Gigantic enough to make co-founder Larry Ellison snatch away Elon Musk's title of world's richest billionaire briefly, the $244 billion rally in Oracle shares on Wednesday equals the combined market capitalization of India's top 3 tech firms - TCS, Infosys and HCL Tech. Oracle shares ended the overnight session on Wall Street about 36% higher after projecting that its cloud infrastructure revenue will reach $144 billion by fiscal 2030, compared to $10.3 billion in fiscal 2025. The company's shares ended with a net market cap gain of $244 billion as its total market value soared to $922 billion. The American tech giant is now the 12th most valued firm in the world and is on track to join the elite $1 trillion club. Back on Dalal Street, the combined market value of Infosys, TCS and HCL Tech totals to roughly about $244 billion. Even India's most valued company Reliance Industries' market value of $212 billion looks smaller in front of Oracle's single-day rally, which was the biggest one-day percentage jump for the company since 1992. Oracle's Founder Ellison and its largest shareholder with more than 40% stake in the company saw his soaring by $88.5 billion in a day as a result of the massive boom. He even briefly overtook Musk in the No.1 slot and Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows his current net worth at $383 billion, marginally lower than Musk's $384 billion fortune. On Tuesday, the company unveiled four multi-billion-dollar contracts, amid an industry-wide shift, led by companies such as OpenAI and xAI, to aggressively spend to secure the massive computing capacity needed to stay ahead in the AI race. Besides, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that OpenAI has signed a contract to purchase $300 billion in computing power from Oracle over roughly five years, marking one of the biggest cloud contracts ever signed. Known for its database software, Oracle has recently found success in the red-hot cloud computing market and is emerging as a key provider of AI computing capacity, competing against cloud leaders Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. Oracle now sees $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2026, with the company calling for the annual sum to reach $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Bank of America analysts said Oracle's "exceptional backlog" cements its place as "a key AI enabler." They upgraded the stock to buy from neutral in a note Wednesday.

Oracle's blockbuster surge shows AI trade's growing influence on market

(Reuters) -Wall Street's "AI trade" has propelled the market to record highs this year, and Oracle's stunning share-price gains are giving investors another reason to back the trade. Oracle shares jumped 36% on Wednesday after the company pointed to a demand surge from AI firms for its cloud services. The surge lifted its market value to $922 billion, leapfrogging the values of Eli Lilly LLY.N, JPMorgan Chase JPM.N and Walmart WMT.N. Gains this year for Oracle, Broadcom, Palantir and other tech companies illustrate how AI has dominated markets, despite occasional pullbacks related to concerns about the rally becoming overheated. Meanwhile, the "Magnificent Seven" megacap trade that led stocks higher for much of this bull market has stumbled somewhat this year as shares of Apple and Tesla have skidded. "When people were beginning to get a little bit concerned about the AI and its related infrastructure growth slowing down a bit, Oracle comes out with a number that just surprises everybody and fuels the fire of that whole subgroup," said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel in Charlottesville, Virginia. "This is a sign of the overall AI trade once again getting in the driver's seat as far as equity markets are concerned." Oracle is now one of Wall Street's 10 most valuable companies. Nearly all of these are viewed as leaders in AI, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon. AI chip heavyweight Nvidia this year became the world's most valuable company in history, displacing Microsoft and iPhone seller Apple, which many investors view as straggling in the race to dominate emerging AI technology. Nvidia's stock price has dipped about 2% since it gave an uninspiring sales forecast on August 27, but its stock market value remained at $4.3 trillion as of Wednesday's close. Meanwhile tech shares have steadied after wobbling last month when investors pointed to signs of emerging caution related to the AI trade. The technology sector is up more than 16% so far in 2025. Oracle's $922 billion stock market value following Wednesday's surge was just behind Berkshire Hathaway's, $1.06 trillion, which trails Tesla's $1.12 trillion. Oracle unveiled four multi-billion-dollar contracts on Tuesday, taking advantage of an industry-wide shift led by companies such as OpenAI and xAI, to aggressively spend to secure the massive computing capacity needed in the AI race. The U.S. stock market's eight most valuable AI-related companies, including Oracle and chipmaker Broadcom, now make up almost 30% of the S&P 500. AI-related companies also have been by far the largest contributors to the benchmark index's gains in recent months. Gains in the shares of Nvidia, Microsoft, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Amazon, Palantir Technologies and Oracle, together have accounted for around half of the S&P 500's 11% increase so far in 2025, according to a Reuters calculation of LSEG data. Over the past five trading days, nine of Wall Street's 10 most traded companies have been related to AI, with Apple the exception. Nvidia leads the list, with an average of $29 billion worth of trades per day, according to LSEG data. AI stock enthusiasm has spread beyond tech-related areas, boosting shares of utilities and power equipment companies that will need to feed the surging energy demand to fuel the technology. Industrial firm GE Vernova and utilities sector members Constellation Energy and Vistra are among the non-tech stocks that have put up massive gains in the past year, helped by AI excitement. The AI enthusiasm has helped drive the U.S. stock market's valuation well above historical levels. The S&P 500 is trading at over 22 times the expected earnings of its constituents, around its highest valuation in four years, according to LSEG Datastream. That compares to an average P/E of 18.6 for the past 10 years. Tech -- which has by far the heaviest weighting in the S&P 500 of the 11 sectors -- has seen its forward P/E rise to over 28 times, versus its 10-year average of about 22, according to LSEG Datastream. After Wednesday's surge, Oracle's stock has nearly doubled in price year-to-date, with other large tech stocks putting up eye-popping increases. Palantir shares have soared 120% in 2025 as of Wednesday while Broadcom had jumped nearly 60%. "I was very surprised by the magnitude of the (Oracle) jump and it shows that there is still a lot of life left in the AI trade and a lot of money still willing to be funneled into the AI trade," said Chuck Carlson, chief executive officer at Horizon Investment Services in Hammond, Indiana. (Reporting by Lewis Krauskopf and Noel Randewich; editing by Megan Davies and David Gregorio) By Noel Randewich and Lewis Krauskopf

Oracle goes from AI laggard to 'next big player,' market expert says

STORY: The company unveiled four multi-billion-dollar contracts on Tuesday amid an industry-wide shift, led by companies such as OpenAI and xAI, to aggressively spend to secure the massive computing capacity needed to stay ahead in the AI race. "The sheer magnitude of just how quickly they've been able to get up the curve and also show it through commitments on the other side is what the big surprise was," Buchanan said. He added that at "a moment where the market was kind of looking for the next big player, Oracle clearly put itself out there as potentially one to watch over the next several months."

oracle: Explained: What's behind the Oracle rally - The Economic Times

Oracle reported a massive increase in contract bookings for its cloud infrastructure, due to rising artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. The company's Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO), the most popular measure of booked revenue, jumped by 359% year-over-year to about $455 billion.Oracle's stock lifted Wall Street on Wednesday, soaring about 36% for its biggest single-day gain since 1992. The surge propelled CEO Larry Ellison to become the richest person in the world, surpassing close friend Elon Musk. But what exactly is driving this rally? ETtech explains. AI cloud infrastructure demand Oracle reported a massive increase in contract bookings for its cloud infrastructure, due to rising artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. The company's Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO), the most popular measure of booked revenue, jumped by 359% year-over-year to about $455 billion. This backlog indicates a multi-year growth runway as more and more enterprises adopt AI across industries. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," CEO Safra Catz said during a post-earnings call. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud currently rule the cloud computing market with a combined 65% share. Oracle, Alibaba, CoreWeave and others hold a smaller share. Oracle added around $230 billion to its market valuation, taking the total to around $922 billion, as of Thursday morning. If the gains hold, it might take the company closer to the coveted $1 trillion-dollar club. Financials Oracle missed market expectations for first-quarter revenue on Tuesday. Revenue for the quarter stood at $14.93 billion, compared with analysts' average estimate of $15.04 billion. The company said it had signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the first quarter, driving a 12% increase in revenue. The company projected that its cloud business revenues would surge 77% in the current fiscal year to $18 billion. In subsequent years, revenues are expected to rise to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion. Strategic deals Oracle has secured large multi-billion-dollar contracts with major AI companies. It has entered into deals with Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft to let their cloud customers run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) alongside native services. Analysts also highlighted Oracle's role in SoftBank and OpenAI's Stargate project as another tailwind. The company also supplies cloud services to Musk's xAI. Separately, it was reported on Wednesday that OpenAI and Oracle signed a deal for the former to purchase $300 billion in computing power from the latter over five years, in one of the biggest cloud contracts ever signed. What we know Ellison briefly became the richest man in the world, when the Oracle rally took his net worth up $101 billion to around $395.7 billion, ahead of Musk at $385 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ellison owns a 41% stake in Oracle. ET reported that the company has begun streamlining its operations in some markets. Oracle has laid off some Indian staff, impacting about 100 employees across teams so far, in a cost cutting measure.

Oracle surges on AI cloud growth as customers race to secure computing capacity

(Reuters) - Oracle shares soared about 35% on Wednesday after the company pointed to a demand surge for its cloud services from AI firms, underscoring its deeper push into the backbone of artificial intelligence systems. The surge in Oracle's cloud business reflects a broader shift in the industry, with companies such as OpenAI and xAI scrambling to secure massive computing capacity needed to stay ahead in the AI race by boosting spending to hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The stock was up 34.7%, hitting a record high of $325.90 in early trading, set for its biggest one-day jump since 1992. The company will add about $237 billion to its market valuation, taking the total valuation to around $915 billion, if gains hold, and bringing Oracle closer to the coveted $1 trillion-dollar club. Its shares have risen 45% so far this year, outperforming stocks in the so-called Magnificent Seven and the broader S&P 500 index, with investors betting big on AI-driven cloud firms. Oracle's results lifted shares of Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices, which supply semiconductors used in data centers. Shares of the companies rose between 2.8% and 4.6% in early trading. Competitor CoreWeave's shares were up 17%. Oracle reported four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three clients during the August quarter, highlighting a robust appetite for its cloud services. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Still, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud dominate the cloud computing market with a combined 65% share, while Oracle, Alibaba, CoreWeave and others hold a smaller slice of the market. The company has struck deals with Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft let their cloud customers run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) alongside native services. The revenue from these partnerships rose more than sixteen-fold in the first quarter. "What matters here is that this figure now includes contributions from the Stargate venture and two other big AI players, meaning revenues beyond 2026 go much higher," said Ben Reitzes, analyst at Melius Research. Analysts also flagged Oracle's role in SoftBank and OpenAI's Stargate project as another tailwind, giving the company a foothold in the large-scale AI infrastructure project that is expected to channel about $500 billion in spending. Oracle also supplies cloud services to xAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, the world's richest person and a longtime ally of the cloud computing company's chairman Larry Ellison. Ellison, 81, whose net worth is largely built on his 41% stake in Oracle, is fast approaching Musk in the race for the world's richest title, according to Forbes data. Oracle's stock is trading at over 33.34 times its 12-month forward earnings estimates, compared with Amazon's 32.34 and Microsoft's 30.83. (Reporting by Akriti Shah and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Alun John in London; Editing by Amanda Cooper and Shinjini Ganguli)

Oracle shares surge 35% on AI cloud growth as customers race to secure computing capacity

Oracle shares soared about 35% on Wednesday after the company pointed to a demand surge for its cloud services from AI firms, underscoring its deeper push into the backbone of artificial intelligence systems. Oracle shares soared about 35% on Wednesday after the company pointed to a demand surge for its cloud services from AI firms, underscoring its deeper push into the backbone of artificial intelligence systems. The surge in Oracle's cloud business reflects a broader shift in the industry, with companies such as OpenAI and xAI scrambling to secure massive computing capacity needed to stay ahead in the AI race by boosting spending to hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The stock was up 34.7%, hitting a record high of $325.90 in early trading, set for its biggest one-day jump since 1992. The company will add about $237 billion to its market valuation, taking the total valuation to around $915 billion, if gains hold, and bringing Oracle closer to the coveted $1 trillion-dollar club. Its shares have risen 45% so far this year, outperforming stocks in the so-called Magnificent Seven and the broader S&P 500 index, with investors betting big on AI-driven cloud firms. Oracle's results lifted shares of Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices, which supply semiconductors used in data centers. Shares of the companies rose between 2.8% and 4.6% in early trading. Competitor CoreWeave's shares were up 17%. Oracle reported four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three clients during the August quarter, highlighting a robust appetite for its cloud services. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Still, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud dominate the cloud computing market with a combined 65% share, while Oracle, Alibaba, CoreWeave and others hold a smaller slice of the market. The company has struck deals with Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft let their cloud customers run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) alongside native services. The revenue from these partnerships rose more than sixteen-fold in the first quarter. "What matters here is that this figure now includes contributions from the Stargate venture and two other big AI players, meaning revenues beyond 2026 go much higher," said Ben Reitzes, analyst at Melius Research. Analysts also flagged Oracle's role in SoftBank and OpenAI's Stargate project as another tailwind, giving the company a foothold in the large-scale AI infrastructure project that is expected to channel about $500 billion in spending. Oracle also supplies cloud services to xAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, the world's richest person and a longtime ally of the cloud computing company's chairman Larry Ellison. Ellison, 81, whose net worth is largely built on his 41% stake in Oracle, is fast approaching Musk in the race for the world's richest title, according to Forbes data. Oracle's stock is trading at over 33.34 times its 12-month forward earnings estimates, compared with Amazon's 32.34 and Microsoft's 30.83.

The $455bn jackpot - Oracle is changing the face of the cloud

This euphoria is not irrational. Behind this market movement lies an industrial and strategic transformation of rare magnitude, repositioning Oracle amongst the big names in the cloud, alongside giants such as AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud (Alphabet). At the heart of this announcement, one indicator caught everyone's eye: Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO), i.e., contracted but not yet recognized revenue. In the space of three months, this indicator rose to $455bn, up 359%. In other words, Oracle now has an order book worth over seven times its current annual revenue. This spectacular jump can be explained by the signing of four multi-billion dollar contracts with three major clients, including OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and xAI. These agreements do not only concern the training of artificial intelligence models, but above all the inference phase, when the models are used on a large scale. As Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, pointed out, "the inference market is much larger than the training market." CEO Safra Catz has made some dizzying predictions. Revenue from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) division, estimated at $18bn this year, is expected to soar to $144bn in five years, a scenario that is well above Wall Street expectations ($91bn). One might legitimately wonder how Oracle will transform this record order book and ambitious outlook into concrete revenue in such a short time, given that its estimated total revenue for this year is around $67bn. For investors, this outlook is shaking up the cloud hierarchy. Oracle, long considered a laggard in the digital race, finds itself propelled to the forefront thanks to the explosion in computing power requirements for generative AI. While this rise in power raises hopes, it also raises questions. How does Oracle intend to deliver such capabilities in a context of semiconductor shortages and when its rivals are announcing colossal capex? Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta Platforms together plan to spend over $350bn in capex in 2024, and more than $400bn in 2026. Meanwhile, Oracle has raised its capital expenditure for the current fiscal year to $35bn. However, the group insists on the specificity of its model. Safra Catz summed it up as follows: "I wouldn't call it asset light, but let's say asset pretty light." Unlike hyperscalers, Oracle does not build its own buildings or land on a massive scale. Its capex is almost exclusively dedicated to equipment that directly generates revenue: GPUs, servers, and very high-performance networks. Data centers are based on leased space or partnerships. As a result, every dollar spent translates more quickly into revenue, with sometimes only a week between the installation of the equipment and actual billing. This streamlined model has three major advantages. First, it offers greater agility: Oracle can quickly deploy cloud capacity as contracts are signed. Second, there is a better correlation between investment and revenue, since each deployment responds to a firm contractual demand (the famous $455bn in RPOs). Finally, technological differentiation: Oracle claims superior performance from its networks and superclusters, reducing the cost of training models for its customers. This positioning echoes a strategic dynamic: Oracle is not seeking to compete head-on with AWS or Azure on overall volume, but to capture the explosive growth of AI with a different capitalistic approach. By outsourcing real estate and focusing its efforts on hardware, the company offers an attractive alternative for companies concerned about flexibility and costs. Oracle's announcement goes beyond its financial results. It illustrates the turning point in the AI and cloud sector. Demand is no longer focused solely on training colossal models such as GPT-4 or Gemini, but above all on inference, i.e., everyday use by millions of users and businesses. And it is precisely this segment that Oracle is targeting. With its Stargate partnership, which involves $500bn in investments with OpenAI and SoftBank, Oracle is establishing itself at the heart of a global ecosystem. The $30 billion annual contract with OpenAI, including the development of multiple data centers, confirms this ambition. Ultimately, Oracle could become the "enterprise AI infrastructure OS," just as Windows was once the PC OS. In the space of a quarter, Oracle has achieved what few investors anticipated: establishing itself as a key player in the cloud and AI sectors. Admittedly, its current revenues ($14.9bn in the last quarter) are still modest compared to sector giants. However, its order book, contractual momentum, and the originality of its investment model are changing perceptions. The question is no longer whether Oracle can catch up, but how far it can go. In an industry dominated by the race for capital expenditure, Oracle has chosen to do things differently. And the market, by sending its stock up 28% in one evening, has clearly validated this strategy.

Oracle stock stuns Wall Street: ORCL jumps 31% premarket on $500B AI cloud surge -- from cloud laggard to Wall Street's new AI darling, time to bet?

Oracle (ORCL) stunned Wall Street on Wednesday, with shares soaring 31% in premarket trading after the company projected $500 billion in future cloud revenue. The jump reflects unprecedented demand for AI-driven infrastructure, turning Oracle from a longtime cloud laggard into a leading AI player. With the surge, the company's market capitalization could top $878 billion, adding roughly $208 billion in value, highlighting the growing investor appetite for AI cloud bets. The premarket rally lifted broader tech sentiment, with chipmakers AMD (+3.2%), Nvidia (+1.96%), and Broadcom (+2.28%) seeing gains. Oracle reported signing four multibillion-dollar contracts in Q1, including deals with OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Nvidia, fueling optimism for AI infrastructure adoption. ALSO READ: US stock market futures today: Dow slips while S&P 500 and Nasdaq edge higher as Wall Street braces for inflation data -- Top stocks to watch today Its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) revenue is expected to grow 77% this fiscal year, hitting $18 billion and reaching $144 billion over the next four years -- well above Wall Street's expectations. Analysts say this transformation has major market implications. Oracle's efficiency in scaling cloud operations, combined with AI demand, challenges competitors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Investors are closely watching how Oracle manages computing capacity to meet surging inferencing demand. With the AI boom reshaping cloud adoption, Oracle's growth could signal a broader tech rally, but also raises questions about sustainability, capacity, and competition in the high-stakes AI infrastructure race. The surge comes after Oracle reported an "astonishing quarter," driven by four multibillion-dollar contracts signed with AI giants like OpenAI, Meta, and xAI. The company's remaining performance obligations (RPO) -- the best measure of locked-in future revenue -- jumped 359% to $455 billion in the quarter ending August 31, far surpassing analyst estimates. Oracle now forecasts its cloud infrastructure revenue to grow 77% this fiscal year to $18 billion, with the business expected to expand to $144 billion over the next four years. That's nearly 60% above Wall Street expectations and puts Oracle's growth trajectory closer to Amazon Web Services, which posted $107 billion in revenue last year. Oracle was late to cloud computing compared with rivals, but its low-cost, efficiency-driven infrastructure has become a magnet for AI firms needing vast computing power. In July, OpenAI signed a $30 billion annual contract, leasing 4.5 gigawatts of capacity from Oracle -- a deal that will require multiple new U.S. data centers. Beyond OpenAI, Oracle has cut deals with Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft to run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure inside their platforms, with revenue from these partnerships up an eye-popping 1,529% in Q1. Morningstar analysts noted Oracle's participation in Stargate, the $500 billion AI supercomputer project backed by SoftBank and OpenAI, cements its role in both AI training and inferencing workloads -- the latter widely expected to eclipse the training market in scale. Oracle's premarket surge lifts its stock price to $312.65, up 45% year-to-date, far outpacing the broader market. The stock now trades at 33.34 times forward earnings, slightly richer than Amazon (32.34) and Microsoft (30.83). That premium reflects investor confidence that Oracle's capital-light model -- spending less on real estate and maximizing hardware efficiency -- can deliver faster growth with lower investment compared to rivals. The company raised its annual capex forecast by $10 billion to $35 billion, still well below the hundreds of billions peers are deploying for AI data centers. If sustained, the surge would not only reprice Oracle's role in the cloud economy but also reshape the wealth rankings at the top: Ellison's fortune, tied to his 41% ownership stake, could soon challenge Musk's. The ripple effects of Oracle's results spread quickly across Wall Street. Shares of AMD rose 3.2%, Nvidia gained 1.96%, and Broadcom added 2.28% in premarket trading, reflecting optimism that AI-driven demand for chips and cloud infrastructure remains in its early innings. Meanwhile, rival cloud leaders Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are expected to spend over $350 billion on AI-related infrastructure this year, with that figure topping $400 billion by 2026, according to industry forecasts. Oracle's rapid growth has raised questions about whether it can secure enough chips and infrastructure capacity to keep up with contracts, especially as competitors also face supply constraints. Oracle's meteoric rise highlights a structural shift: AI is no longer just a tech trend, it's reshaping the cloud economy itself. The company's forecast suggests demand for inferencing -- running AI models after training -- is already outstripping training capacity, pointing to years of sustained growth. Q1: Why did Oracle shares jump 31% premarket today? Oracle shares surged due to a forecast of $500B AI cloud revenue and multibillion-dollar deals with OpenAI, Meta, and Nvidia, signaling massive growth in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Q2: How is Oracle's AI cloud surge affecting other tech stocks? The premarket rally boosted peers: AMD +3.2%, Nvidia +1.96%, Broadcom +2.28%, reflecting heightened investor confidence in AI infrastructure and enterprise cloud demand.

Oracle boosts cloud infrastructure revenue forecast, shares jump 23%

(Reuters) - Oracle said on Tuesday it expects revenue in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business to grow 77% this year, from earlier projections of 70%, boosted by growing cloud demand and sending its shares up 23% after the bell. The company forecasts OCI revenue to rise 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year and on to $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Oracle also said it had signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the first quarter, helping a 12% increase in revenue to $14.93 billion. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, the most popular measure of booked revenue, jumped 359% to $455 billion in the first quarter ended August 31. "Enterprises are clearly eager for cost-effective AI cloud tools, and Oracle is positioning itself to capture that demand," said eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne. Oracle offers integrated cloud technologies along with flexible deployment models. It has struck deals with Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft for OCI to run inside their respective cloud infrastructure, expanding Oracle's total addressable market. "MultiCloud database revenue from Amazon, Google and Microsoft grew at the incredible rate of 1,529% in the first quarter," said Chairman Larry Ellison. "We expect MultiCloud revenue to grow substantially every quarter for several years as we deliver another 37 datacenters to our three Hyperscaler partners, for a total of 71." (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona)

oracle: Oracle expects half a trillion dollars in booked cloud orders, stock rises 27% - The Economic Times

The company's remaining performance obligations, or RPO, the most popular measure of booked revenue, jumped 359% to $455 billion in the first quarter, ended August 31. Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars, CEO Safra Catz said.Oracle said on Tuesday it expects booked revenue at its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business to exceed half a trillion dollars, boosted by growing demand for its relatively low-cost cloud infrastructure services and sending its shares up 27% after the bell. The company's remaining performance obligations, or RPO, the most popular measure of booked revenue, jumped 359% to $455 billion in the first quarter, ended August 31. "Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars," said CEO Safra Catz. Oracle, whose shares have risen over 107% so far this year, forecast OCI revenue growth of 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year, and on to $144 billion over the subsequent four years. "Enterprises are clearly eager for cost-effective AI cloud tools, and Oracle is positioning itself to capture that demand," said eMarketer analyst Jacob Bourne. Oracle offers integrated cloud technologies along with flexible deployment models, enabling it to meet a range of customer demands. "We made it very easy for our customers to directly connect all their databases ... to the world's most advanced AI reasoning models - ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, all of which are uniquely available in the Oracle Cloud," Catz said on a post-earnings call. Even though it is a smaller player, "both current and forecast numbers show that Oracle's investment in infrastructure is continuing to pay off as large organizations look to Oracle Cloud to support their AI initiatives," said Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir. It has struck deals with Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft for OCI to run inside their respective cloud infrastructure. Revenue from these clients grew 1,529% in the first quarter. "We expect MultiCloud revenue to grow substantially every quarter for several years as we deliver another 37 datacenters to our three hyperscaler partners, for a total of 71," Chairman Larry Ellison said. "By offering integrated solutions across various environments, Oracle is not just keeping up but actually leading the way in the cloud space. This could attract even more businesses looking for versatile cloud options," according to Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global's Visible Alpha. Oracle also said it had signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the first quarter, helping a 12% increase in revenue to $14.93 billion. For the second quarter, Oracle expects total revenue to grow 12% to 14%, while it sees cloud revenue growth between 32% to 36%.