In a world where growth and AI CapEx are all that matter, Oracle reigns as a monarch, judging by the scorching hot gains in the stock over the past few hours, which have allowed the company's co-founder and CTO, Larry Ellison, to become a serious contender for Elon Musk's title as the world's richest person.
Oracle, once known for its database software and other enterprise-geared offerings, has become a major cloud player in recent years, and now stands ready to transform into the go-to AI infrastructure builder, thanks to its ever-expanding rostrum of AI data center deals.
The company reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2025 on Tuesday, broadly missing expectations on almost all counts: Oracle's Q2 revenue stood at $14.93 billon vs. the $15.02 billion consensus estimate, with notable weakness in the cloud segment, and the EPS print for the quarter also missed the consensus estimate by $0.01.
Yet, only one thing seemed to matter: the fact that Oracle's revenue backlog has increased by nearly 4x quarter-over-quarter, thanks to the four mega-deals that the company has inked with three customers: OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Meta.
What's more, Oracle's guidance for its cloud business was surprising:
"We expect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue [of ~$10BN] to grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year—and then increase to $32 billion [double], $73 billion [double], $114 billion [almost double], and $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Most of the revenue in this 5-year forecast is already booked in our reported RPO. Oracle is off to a brilliant start to FY26."
Of course, this is not surprising in hindsight, especially as Oracle is a key cog in the $500 billion, 10GW Stargate AI initiative. As we reported a few weeks back, OpenAI has now inked a mammoth 4.5GW data center deal with Oracle, which entails payments of $30 billion per year to Oracle starting in around three years. For context, OpenAI's Sam Altman is on record for saying that a 5GW data center capacity requires an investment of around $100 billion.
OpenAI finalized its deal with Oracle in July. While the site for this expansion has not been announced yet, OpenAI's Stargate I data center is currently being developed at Abilene by Oracle and Crusoe.
Coming back, Oracle shares are up over 31 percent in today's pre-market trading, currently hovering at the $76 price level. These gains have pushed Oracle's already stretched valuation to an extreme, making it nigh impossible for value-conscious funds to buy into this extreme bloat.
As such, the ongoing rally in Oracle shares has all of the vibes of a retail-driven meme stock momentum mania, apart from the fact that Oracle actually mints money, as opposed to the ever-struggling GameStop or AMC Entertainment.
Finally, do note that Larry Ellison's net worth has risen by around $70 billion over the past few hours, and is currently hovering at around $364 billion vs. Elon Musk's $384 billion, as per Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. In this crazy world, a CTO might well eclipse the wealth of a CEO. Of course, Ellison's ascent might prove to be ephemeral, given Elon Musk's upcoming mammoth $1 trillion pay package.
Update: Larry Ellison is now officially the richest person on the planet!
Update 2: WSJ is reporting that OpenAI is responsible for around $300 billion out of Oracle's $455 billion RPO.
Note: A previous version of the article erroneously claimed that OpenAI had inked another 4.5GW contract with Oracle.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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