Oracle Stock Explodes Right After Ellison Revealed a Secret Buyer Bought It All (Mid-Earnings Call)

My grandpa still runs a farm out in Illinois. He’s got the newer tractors… ones with touchscreens, Bluetooth, even air-conditioned cabs. But the machine he trusts most is an old Massey Ferguson that’s been kicking since before he could grow a mustache. Paint’s peeling, it rattles like an old pickup, and it smells like diesel and memories… but when the fancy stuff breaks down, that’s the one he fires up. It just works. That’s kind of how Oracle has operated for years.

While the tech world fawns over the sexy names (Amazon, Microsoft, Google… you know, the usual suspects throwing keynotes with fog machines), Oracle’s been in the background, doing the work nobody wants to talk about. The cloud boom came and went, headlines were written, Gartner reports were published… and Oracle just kept chugging along. Still powering back-end systems for governments, Fortune 500s, and massive healthcare networks. Still moving billions through old-school enterprise software.

But something shifted this quarter. That old Massey Ferguson just rolled out of the barn with a new engine… and suddenly, everyone’s paying attention. Oracle posted a blowout Q4. Revenue hit $15.90 billion, up 11% year-over-year and ahead of analyst estimates. EPS came in at $1.70, beating the expected $1.64. Net income climbed to $3.43 billion. For a company that usually gets less attention than a middle child, these numbers forced a double take. But more than the beat… it was the outlook that really turned heads.

CEO Safra Catz said Oracle’s cloud infrastructure revenue (aka the part of the business that actually gets credit for AI innovation) is expected to grow over 70% in fiscal 2026. And that’s after rising 52% this past quarter to reach a $3 billion run rate. Not long ago, this segment was Oracle’s “yeah, we have cloud too” answer. Now, it’s starting to look like a real threat to the big dogs (and probably making someone at AWS work a little bit harder today). Total cloud revenue, including SaaS, is projected to grow more than 40% this year… nearly double last year’s pace. And that long-term $104 billion revenue goal Oracle set for 2029 is old news. The new target is $67 billion by 2026, a 16% YoY jump that leaves almost no room for error.

And then, right on cue, Larry Ellison showed up. At 79, he still commands the stage and has more aura than most rockstars. On the call, Ellison dropped that one unnamed client ordered all of Oracle’s remaining cloud capacity. Not just a big order. Not just a multi-region expansion. Literally all of it. He made it sound like Oracle had to shuffle infrastructure like it was playing cloud Tetris just to fulfill the request. I guess this is normal now.

It lines up with the numbers. Oracle’s Remaining Performance Obligations (the “we already sold it, we just haven’t delivered it yet” bucket) jumped 41% YoY to $138 billion. They now expect that number to more than double to $276 billion by fiscal 2026. Wolfe Research even compared Oracle’s backlog to Microsoft’s (big praise). Oracle’s ramping up its infrastructure push in a big way. It already runs 23 live multi-cloud data centers and has 47 more in the pipeline for this year alone. And its “Cloud@Customer” service (which installs Oracle’s hardware directly inside a client’s facility) just skyrocketed 104% year-over-year. That’s no longer a test run. That’s serious buy-in from companies writing very large checks.

Those wallets include IBM, SoftBank, the Cleveland Clinic, and yes… even Temu (Amazon’s arch rival). Oracle is also a core partner in OpenAI’s Stargate project… the massive AI supercluster initiative that might end up creating the world’s most expensive chatbot.

Of course, this kind of growth isn’t free. Oracle dropped $21 billion in capex last year (three times what it spent the year before) and plans to top $25 billion this year. That’s going to hurt margins and free cash flow (which is worth noting). Operating margins are projected to dip to 41% in 2026, and slide a little more the year after that. But when you’re fielding billion-dollar orders, you don’t cheap out. You double down and hope the accountants don’t cry too loudly.

Depending on how you feel about Larry Ellison’s Hawaiian island obsession, maybe Wall Street’s getting a little too excited. Jefferies increased their price target to $220. Wolfe Research followed close behind at $215. Citizens JMP went even higher, implementing a $240 target on it. And even Stifel (who usually approaches Oracle earnings like they’re the plague) raised their target to $180, though they couldn’t help but wring their hands over margins. But the market doesn’t seem to care, considering the stock’s up 14% today.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon, Microsoft, and Google as mentioned in the article.