Safra A. Catz, CEO of Oracle, on Oct. 7, 2024.
Marco Bello | Reuters
Oracle shares closed down 6% on Thursday, a day after the stock closed at a record high, following an analyst note expressing concern that most of the company’s upcoming growth is coming from a single client: OpenAI.
The software vendor has seen its stock go on a wild ride this week after CEO Safra Catz on Tuesday said that Oracle had “signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers” in the latest quarter. The company’s remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, swelled to $455 billion, up 359% year over year.
In its forecasts, Oracle called for cloud infrastructure revenue to expand 14-fold by 2030.
In extended trading on Tuesday, Oracle stock moved up 30% following the company announcing fiscal first-quarter results. On Wednesday, the stock ended the day up nearly 36%, closing at a record high of $328.33.
The build-out is part of a broad expansion across technology to put in place the necessary infrastructure to meet demand for applications that draw on sophisticated artificial intelligence models that typically run on Nvidia chips.
But the excitement around Oracle’s projections were tempered after The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that OpenAI is set to pay Catz’s company $300 billion over five years. That report came after OpenAI during the quarter announced an agreement with Oracle to build 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity. The two companies declined to comment on the report.
“Our enthusiasm for Oracle’s backlog announcements is significantly tempered by the report that it came almost entirely from OpenAI,” Gil Luria, an analyst with a neutral rating on Oracle shares, wrote in a note distributed to clients on Thursday.
