The Oracle of Omaha may be on his way out—but the Oracle of Oracle is winning big.
Larry Ellison, the co-founder, chairman, and CTO of Oracle, has surpassed Elon Musk to become the richest person in the world after his net worth jumped by $101 billion today. That means Ellison is now worth $393 billion, beating Musk’s measly $385 billion.
The biggest single-day jump in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ever matches the suddenly frantic hype surrounding Oracle’s stock. Shares exploded 35.91% today after the company released a stellar fiscal forecast—making today its best since 1992 and putting its market cap at nearly $1 trillion.
All roads lead back to AI: The reason for the jump, if you haven’t already guessed, is the company’s role in the artificial intelligence revolution. Specifically, its cloud contract demand, which is booming: The firm revealed it has an enormous AI backlog of $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, up 359% from the year prior. On top of that, Oracle now forecasts $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue for fiscal 2026, a 77% year over year increase. Even crazier, it said it expects cloud infrastructure sales to hit $114 billion by 2029.
As if all that wasn’t enough, late in the day the Wall Street Journal revealed that Oracle has signed a $300 billion deal with OpenAI to provide the AI startup with up to 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity—more than two Hoover Dams worth of power, according to the WSJ.
That’s a lot of money
Analysts were left gobsmacked by the stellar numbers. “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 toward Data Center Operator,” Morgan Stanley’s Keith Weiss wrote.
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Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank analysts called the figures “truly awesome.”
“In our 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,” wrote Deutsche Bank’s Brad Zelnick. He rates Oracle a buy with a $240 price target.
What does Oracle even do again?
Founded in 1977, Oracle has gone through its fair share of different eras when it comes to software and hardware development.
Oracle’s rapid transformation into an AI infrastructure giant recalls another fan favorite: Nvidia. But even Nvidia doesn’t predict profits as far out as the next quarter due to the uncertainty of the AI industry, suggesting that perhaps Oracle is getting a little ahead of its skis with those hefty forecasts, the WSJ warned.
If there’s anything that Jensen Huang could teach Ellison, it’s that once the bar is raised high enough, investors only want to see you jump higher.—LB