Stock nears $1 trillion valuation after record-breaking forecast
Oracle shares surged 40% on Wednesday, putting the company on track for its best trading day since 1992 and pushing its market capitalization to $950 billion. The rally follows a staggering update on cloud infrastructure demand and a massive backlog of future business that far exceeded Wall Street expectations.
The company revealed late Tuesday that it now has $455 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO), a 359% increase from a year ago. Analysts had anticipated around $180 billion. “This is a very historic kind of print right here from Oracle,” said Ben Reitzes of Melius Research. “That is astounding.”
AI boom cements Oracle as cloud infrastructure leader
Oracle has been a major winner in the artificial intelligence race, thanks to its cloud platform and access to Nvidia’s high-performance GPUs required for training and running large AI models. The company is positioning itself alongside industry giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in the battle for cloud dominance.
Founder Larry Ellison is poised to gain roughly $100 billion in net worth from the stock surge, reportedly overtaking Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the world’s richest person, according to Bloomberg.
Staggering long-term projections ignite analyst enthusiasm
Looking ahead, Oracle expects $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue for fiscal 2026, and it forecasts that figure will climb to $32 billion in 2027, $73 billion in 2028, $114 billion in 2029, and $144 billion by 2030.
Analysts across Wall Street were overwhelmingly positive. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson called the numbers “absolutely staggering,” while Wells Fargo described the update as a “momentous confirmation” of Oracle’s place in the AI ecosystem. Deutsche Bank labeled the quarter “truly awesome” and raised its price target to $335 from $240.
“In our near 20 years covering Oracle and for that matter the entire software industry, there are few quarterly results that match this both in terms of magnitude of revision and clarity of the moment,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote.
Blowout forecast overshadows earnings miss
Despite the market euphoria, Oracle did fall short on both revenue and earnings for its fiscal first quarter. Adjusted earnings came in at $1.47 per share, just under the $1.48 analysts expected. Revenue reached $14.93 billion, missing the $15.04 billion estimate.
Still, the weak quarterly results were largely ignored as attention focused on the company’s future potential. Bank of America upgraded Oracle to “buy” from “neutral,” calling its backlog “exceptional” and a sign that Oracle is becoming a “key AI enabler.”
While some debate remains around the profitability of AI workloads, analysts agree Oracle is capturing significant market share in the fast-growing AI infrastructure space — a shift that could reshape the company’s role in enterprise tech for years to come.
