Oracle has raised expectations for its cloud business, saying that booked revenue in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) segment could exceed 500 billion dollars in remaining performance obligations (RPO). That forecast came alongside impressive financial results and sent the company’s shares rising sharply – up 27% after the bell following the announcement.
In the first fiscal quarter ended August 31, Oracle reported RPO for OCI jumped 359% year-over-year to 455 billion dollars. CEO Safra Catz noted that in coming months Oracle expects to finalize deals pushing that number past the half-trillion mark.
The company also projected that OCI revenue would grow 77% this fiscal year to about 18 billion dollars, with projected growth continuing over the next four years toward 144 billion dollars in OCI revenue.
Drivers of Oracle’s Cloud Expansion
Oracle is positioning itself strongly in the cloud market by offering integrated, flexible deployment models and emphasizing cost efficiency, especially for AI workloads. Enterprises looking to deploy large-scale AI tools are increasingly sensitive to cost, and Oracle is leaning into that demand.
The company has struck major deals with Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft to run parts of their cloud workloads on OCI. Revenue from these partners grew by 1,529 percent in the most recent quarter. It is also expanding its infrastructure footprint: Oracle plans to deliver 37 new data centers with its hyperscaler partners, bringing the total in that partnership to 71.
Broader Impact on Oracle and the Cloud Industry
Oracle’s aggressive growth suggests it sees cloud infrastructure not just as a supporting business but as a core competitive battlefield, especially with AI applications demanding both scale and cost efficiency. If Oracle can maintain or accelerate these numbers, it could shift more enterprise and hyperscaler workloads toward OCI.
For investors, the strong RPO growth and ambitious forecast point to continued revenue expansion, though Oracle still trails larger cloud players in absolute scale. There are risks: supply chain constraints, rising costs of building and powering data centers, and competition from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and emerging players could pressure margins.
In the broader cloud market, Oracle’s success in winning multi-billion-dollar contracts and emphasizing AI-ready infrastructure may push more companies to evaluate cloud providers not just on features, but on cost and ease of integration.
