Boring Oracle became cool again (www.cnn.com)

Oracle has quietly reinvented itself as a major AI infrastructure provider, scoring marquee deals and sending its stock up more than 80% year-to-date. Most notably, reports say OpenAI may pay Oracle as much as $300 billion over five years for data center capacity, and Oracle has joined a $500 billion “Stargate” infrastructure effort. That market validation—plus brief headlines about Larry Ellison reclaiming the top-wealth spot—signals a shift: a once “boring” enterprise software vendor is now a go-to supplier of the large-scale compute that powers today’s generative AI wave. The business case is concrete. Oracle projects cloud infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to $18B in fiscal 2026 and to reach $144B by 2030; remaining performance obligations jumped 359% year-over-year to $455B. Oracle’s close ties to NVIDIA have eased access to in-demand AI GPUs, and because Oracle isn’t busy hosting its own large language model, it can rent more capacity to AI customers. The company is backing this with heavy capex—over $27B in the most recent quarter—and steady cash flow from its legacy database and software units. The upside: faster expansion of AI compute at a critical time. The caveat: Oracle remains smaller than hyperscalers, so if AI demand softens, those outsized RPOs and growth expectations could be at risk.