The software company that you may only recognize from “your session timed out” screens has suddenly emerged as a major winner of the AI boom. This week, Oracle announced hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of contracted revenue from cloud deals with AI giants.
Best day ever (almost)! Oracle’s stock skyrocketed as much as 43% yesterday morning before pulling back to close up 36%. That still represented its biggest single-day gain in more than 30 years, after its dispatch that left analysts “in shock,” per CNBC.
- Oracle is expecting to rake in $455 billion over the next few years for contracts booked last quarter—a fourfold increase from the same time last year.
- That’ll skyrocket its cloud infrastructure revenue from $10 billion last fiscal year to $144 billion by 2030, Oracle projected.
- Most of the payday will come from OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The ChatGPT maker will pay $300 billion over the next five years for Oracle’s cloud computing services.
…as long as AI isn’t a bubble. OpenAI’s revenue is currently less than one-fifth of the amount that it would owe Oracle on average each year, the WSJ noted. Oracle’s future collections mostly depend on ChatGPT taking over the world continuing its exponential growth. Oracle also has contracts with other AI leaders, including xAI and Meta.
Oracle’s co-founder one-upped Elon
The jackpot-like outlook briefly made co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison our planet’s richest person for the first time, Bloomberg reported.
- Since Ellison owns 41% of Oracle shares, yesterday’s morning jump added over $100 billion to his net worth, pushing it a few yards past Elon Musk’s to $393 billion.
- It was the largest single-day wealth increase Bloomberg has ever recorded.
Meet our potential future overlord: In 2012, Ellison bought the sixth-largest island in Hawaii for $300 million to make it more of a playground for the super-rich, which included building a Nobu almost immediately, according to Bloomberg. He’s also dropped millions on Republican political candidates, the University of Michigan’s football program, and a historic Oxford pub.—ML