Oracle shares skyrocketed nearly 36% on Wednesday, marking their best single-day performance since 1992, after the company stunned Wall Street with unprecedented cloud growth projections. The rally added $244 billion to its market value, pushing the company’s capitalization to $922 billion.
The surge followed Tuesday’s earnings release, where Oracle revealed $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, a 359% jump from last year. Analysts had expected around $180 billion. “This is a very historic kind of print right here from Oracle with this backlog,” Ben Reitzes, head of technology research at Melius Research, told CNBC. “That is astounding.”
Oracle’s momentum has been fueled by its cloud infrastructure business and access to Nvidia’s sought-after GPUs, which power advanced artificial intelligence workloads. The company now forecasts $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue for fiscal 2026, projecting the figure to climb to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion in subsequent years.
The eye-popping forecast sent ripples through the market. Analysts described the results as “blown away,” “absolutely staggering,” and “momentous.” Deutsche Bank analysts called them “truly awesome,” reiterating a buy rating and raising their target price to $335 from $240. Bank of America upgraded the stock to buy, citing Oracle’s “exceptional backlog” as evidence it has become “a key AI enabler.”
Oracle’s founder Larry Ellison also saw his wealth surge. Bloomberg reported he briefly overtook Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the world’s richest person, though Forbes still ranked Musk ahead at the time of its last update.
Despite the historic rally, Oracle’s fiscal first-quarter earnings fell slightly short of estimates. Adjusted earnings came in at $1.47 per share versus expectations of $1.48, while revenue totaled $14.93 billion, below forecasts of $15.04 billion. Still, analysts dismissed the miss, saying Oracle’s long-term AI infrastructure prospects far outweighed short-term results.
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