Oracle’s Larry Ellison talks the future of AI at Oracle’s 2024 Analyst Meeting

Investors on Wall Street love when their companies issue great earnings reports. They love it even more when those same companies issue strong guidance for as long as the eyes can see. For Wednesday, September 10, 2025, that company is none other than Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL).

There may just be a catch that needs to be addressed before investors blindly chase this legendary stock higher — Oracle was up 30% at $316.00 after closing at $241.51 just the prior day.

Tactical investors commit their capital where their money will grow in good times or feel the safest if there are any jitters. And, again, today that tactical destination is Oracle. Investors should probably still ask a question here, even if that question is for a reference or pondering only. Is this one of those so-called “NVIDIA moments” or is it the redux of euphoric dot-com reports from 1999 and the first weeks of 2000?

Oracle has been around for decades now. It’s not a new company at all. It has been public since 1986… That’s going on 40 years now as a public company! It was just in June that Tactical Bulls said its strong guidance put tactical investors on notice. But now the market cap is suddenly 30% higher (or 40%) after a single earnings report!

Wall Street analysts are playing catch up with much more aggressive price targets despite not much in formal upgrades. They had their calls right, albeit their prior price targets ahead of earnings didn’t include so many billion-dollar deals coming into the pipe.

BMO Capital Markets reiterated its Outperform rating and raised its price target to $345 from $275. It cited incredibly strong bookings with 359% year/year Remaining Performance Obligations growth. BMO also addressed that this August quarter’s results were actually “lackluster” — but has incremental confidence in Oracle’s revenue and operating income growth for longer-term.

BofA Securities has just upgraded Oracle to Buy from Neutral, and its price objective went up to $368 from $295. BofA also cited strong RPO and backlog growth even as its return on investment for growing capex still looks limited. BofA’s main take is that Oracle is capturing mor share in the AI infrastructure market and is attracting the largest of the AI enterprises as visible customers. That’s just a few leaders like OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia and AMD to name a few.

Evercore ISI reiterated its Outperform rating and raised Oracle’s price target up to $340 from $270, even with Q1 revenue and earnings largely in line with expectations. The huge jump was tied to RPO/OCI to support Oracle’s long-term revenue and earnings acceleration.

Elsewhere…

• Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated its Overweight rating and raised its target to $400 from $271.
• Guggenheim has reiterated its Buy rating and raised its price target to $375 from $250.
• Jefferies reiterated its Buy rating and its target was hiked to $365 from $270.
• JMP Securities reiterated its Market Outperform rating and raised its target to $342 from $315.
• Mizuho Securities reiterated its Outperform rating and raised its target to $350 from $300.
• Piper Sandler reiterated its Overweight rating and raised its price target to $330 from $270.
• Stifel reiterated its Buy rating and raised its target to $350 from $250.
• UBS reiterated its Buy rating and hiked its target to $360 from $280.
• Wolfe Research reiterated its Outperform and its target raised to $400 from $300.

D.A. Davidson was one of the few with a Neutral rating being maintained, although it still raised the price target up to $300 from $220.

Morgan Stanley also maintained its Equal-Weight rating on Oracle in its initial call. Still, the firm noted:

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 towards Data Center Operator. Despite gross margin headwinds, out-year EPS targets are likely to move materially higher.

While Tactical Bulls does not recite earnings reports, here were the main bullet points that Larry Ellison and his team pointed out:

• Q1 Remaining Performance Obligations $455 billion, up 359% in both USD and constant currency
• Q1 GAAP Earnings per Share down 2% to $1.01, Non-GAAP Earnings per Share up 6% to $1.47
• Q1 Total Revenue $14.9 billion, up 12% in USD and up 11% in constant currency
• Q1 Cloud Revenue (IaaS plus SaaS) $7.2 billion, up 28% in USD and up 27% in constant currency
• Q1 Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) Revenue $3.3 billion, up 55% in USD and up 54% in constant currency
• Q1 Cloud Application (SaaS) Revenue $3.8 billion, up 11% in USD and up 10% in constant currency
• Q1 Fusion Cloud ERP (SaaS) Revenue $1.0 billion, up 17% in USD and up 16% in constant currency
• Q1 NetSuite Cloud ERP (SaaS) Revenue $1.0 billion, up 16% in USD and up 15% in constant currency

And Oracle CEO Safra Katz outlined just how much is being won right now with a very strong start to Fiscal Year 2026:

We signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in Q1. This resulted in RPO contract backlog increasing 359% to $455 billion. It was an astonishing quarter—and demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure continues to build. Over the next few months, we expect to sign-up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars. The scale of our recent RPO growth enables us to make a large upward revision to the Cloud Infrastructure portion of Oracle’s overall financial plan which we will be presenting in detail next month at the Financial Analyst Meeting. As a bit of a preview, we expect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year—and then increase to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, 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.

And if a 30% jump wasn’t enough… After 15 minutes of trading and after the pre-market trading, Oracle has traded 30 million shares and the gain was 40% to $338.00. Needless to say, Oracle’s stock hit an all-time high and its market cap is now up at $952 billion!