After a big report, Oracle is suddenly a major player in AI! It was so big, it even knocked “you-know-who” of the top of the world’s richest men list!

As reported in Silicon, Oracle stock jumped as high as 43 percent during trading on Wednesday before closing up about 35 percent after the company projected that its AI cloud revenue would surge to $144 billion by its 2030 fiscal year, up from less than $20 billion for the current fiscal year.

Oracle has been buying vast quantities of Nvidia AI accelerators and offering the compute capacity via its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) business, as tech giants spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build out compute capacity.

Oracle chief executive Safra Catz said in a Tuesday statement that the company expects OCI revenue to grow 77 percent to $18 billion this fiscal year, then to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Its focus on AI has pleased investors, who have pushed its stock up about 178 percent over the past 12 months, including this week’s gains.

Wow.

Oracle has risen so much that, on Wednesday, founder Larry Ellison even temporarily took the title of the world’s richest man away from Elon Musk! By the end of the day, Musk had regained the lead, but only by a billion dollars: $384.2 billion versus $383.2 billion for Ellison.

Side note: I had to stifle a laugh when I wrote the phrase “only by a billion dollars”. Geez.

Catz said the company had signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three customers during the first quarter and expected more to come.

“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,” Catz said on a call with investors.

Remaining performance obligation, or RPO, is the total value of contract revenue that Oracle expects to deliver in the future, based on customer agreements.

Catz said on the call that “significant contracts” have been signed with major AI companies including OpenAI, xAI, Meta and “many others”.

Not all is rosy at Oracle, however. As Oracle has spent heavily on AI infrastructure to compete with the dominant cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, it has laid off workers and reportedly discussed eliminating cash raises and bonuses for staff this year.

Yeah, no need to pay those out when the company is doing so well. Right? Geez.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that Oracle is suddenly a major player in AI? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image Copyright © Warner Bros. See what I did there? 😉

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