Have you ever watched a stock everyone wrote off suddenly wake up and run like it’s 1999 all over again? That’s exactly the vibe I’m getting with Oracle right now.
Yeah, I said Oracle—the company your uncle still thinks only does databases. Turns out while most of us were busy arguing about Nvidia chips, Oracle has quietly positioned itself as one of the biggest winners in the entire artificial intelligence build-out. And the street is finally starting to notice.
Why Wall Street Suddenly Loves Oracle Again
A major bank just came out swinging with one of the most bullish calls I’ve seen this year. They kicked off coverage with an overweight rating and a price target that implies nearly 40% upside from current levels. For a company trading at what now looks like a reasonable forward multiple, that’s the kind of note that makes you sit up and pay attention.
The core of the bull case is pretty straightforward: Oracle isn’t just along for the ride in the AI boom—it’s becoming essential infrastructure. We’re talking multi-year, billion-dollar deals with the exact companies building tomorrow’s largest models. The kind of contracts that lock in revenue for a decade.
The Deal Backlog Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s a number that stopped me cold: Oracle currently sits on the largest remaining performance obligation (that’s analyst-speak for booked-but-not-yet-recognized revenue) of any cloud provider. We’re talking north of $455 billion, pro-forma probably past half a trillion when the latest deals get announced.
To put that in perspective, the next closest competitor reported something like $392 billion last quarter. Oracle isn’t just keeping up—it’s pulling ahead in the one metric that matters most for long-term cloud economics.
When you have the biggest backlog in the industry, you’re not hoping for growth—you’re just waiting for the revenue to hit the income statement.
These aren’t small pilot projects either. We’re talking commitments from the heaviest hitters in generative AI, companies that need massive scale right now and can’t afford to wait three years for new regions to come online.
From Database Dinosaur to Cloud Contender
Let’s be honest—five years ago if you told me Oracle would be mentioned in the same breath as the big three hyperscalers, I would have laughed. The company spent decades as the expensive enterprise software vendor everyone loved to hate.
But something interesting happened. While the usual suspects focused on winning consumer workloads and general-purpose computing, Oracle went straight for the enterprise jugular—and now they’re winning the deals that actually matter for training the largest models.
Think about what these AI labs need: massive GPU clusters, predictable performance, and—perhaps most importantly—someone who can actually deliver thousands of racks this year, not in 2028. Oracle built an entire business around being able to say yes when everyone else was saying “maybe next quarter.”
The Math That Makes Investors Drool
Let’s run some quick numbers because they’re kind of stunning.
- Current cloud market share: roughly 5%
- Projected share by 2029 according to the bull case: around 16%
- That would put Oracle at roughly the same scale as today’s third-largest provider
- Most of this growth expected to come specifically from AI workloads
Sixteen percent doesn’t sound revolutionary until you realize we’re talking about a market that’s going to be measured in trillions, not billions. Capturing even a fraction of the infrastructure spend from the next generation of AI companies represents life-changing revenue for any provider.
And here’s the part that really gets me: the stock has already corrected nearly 42% from its highs. The easy money has been taken off the table, the weak hands have sold, and now you’re looking at a company with accelerating fundamentals trading at what looks like a perfectly reasonable 25 times forward earnings several years out.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Look, no investment is without risk, and Oracle has plenty of skeptics for good reason. The company has disappointed investors before. Execution hasn’t always matched the hype. There’s still a lot of legacy baggage dragging on the multiple.
But here’s what’s different this time: the growth isn’t coming from trying to convince banks to move Oracle databases to the cloud. It’s coming from companies that literally cannot train their next-generation models without the capacity Oracle is bringing online right now.
When your customers are desperate for capacity and you’re one of the few providers who can actually deliver, pricing power works in your favor. When those same customers are signing ten-year deals, visibility becomes exceptional. When the use case is training the models that everyone believes will transform the global economy, well… you’re not exactly selling productivity software anymore.
The Bigger Picture for Tech Investors
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this whole story is what it says about the AI build-out generally. We spend so much time focused on the companies building the models that we sometimes forget someone has to provide the picks and shovels.
In my experience, the infrastructure layer often provides some of the most durable returns in any technology wave. The companies selling the actual computing capacity tend to have better economics than many of the application-layer players that get all the attention.
Oracle’s resurgence suggests we might be entering the phase where the market starts pricing in the full scope of what this AI infrastructure build-out actually costs—and who the real beneficiaries will be.
Sometimes the most obvious AI winners aren’t the ones building chatbots. Sometimes they’re the ones quietly building the data centers those chatbots can’t live without.
The bottom line? Oracle spent years being the uncool kid at the tech party. Now it’s showing up with the keys to the venue, the power supply, and a decade-long guest list of the hottest companies on earth.
Whether shares hit that $280 target specifically is anyone’s guess. But the broader thesis—that Oracle has carved out a durable, high-margin position in the most important technology build-out of our generation—feels increasingly difficult to argue against.
For investors who’ve been waiting for the “next leg” of the AI trade, this might be one of those rare moments where the opportunity is hiding in plain sight. Not in the flashy names everyone’s fighting over, but in the company that’s been quietly building the foundation underneath everything else.
Sometimes the best stories aren’t the ones making the most noise. Sometimes they’re the ones patiently executing while everyone else is looking the other way.
And right now, Oracle looks like it’s writing one hell of a comeback chapter.
