e.l.f. Beauty stock plummets 20% as revenue and guidance fall short of expectations
Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) is pushing aggressively into artificial intelligence and cloud computing dominance, as its shares traded near $250.57 on November 5, 2025, gaining +0.98% intraday with a market capitalization of $713.8 billion. This milestone comes as the company enters what can be defined as its strongest expansion cycle since the early 2000s, powered by explosive demand for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), strategic AI partnerships, and a multi-billion-dollar pipeline tied to OpenAI’s $300 billion cloud commitment.
Oracle’s fiscal 2025 results confirmed a company in transition. Total revenue rose 12.17% YoY to $14.93 billion, with operating income climbing to $6.3 billion (+18.35%) and EPS at $1.47 (+5.76%). The standout performance was in cloud infrastructure, which surged 49.3% YoY, driving management to issue a 77% OCI growth forecast for FY2026 — the highest in company history. Oracle’s revenue mix shows how deeply this shift has taken hold: OCI now represents 18% of total revenue, up from 6% in 2021, while legacy database services have shrunk to 34%.
Oracle’s defining catalyst is its $300 billion, five-year AI infrastructure partnership with OpenAI, which sent its remaining performance obligations (RPO) skyrocketing 359% YoY to $455 billion, with a sequential boost of $317 billion directly linked to this contract. Through the Azure-OCI Interconnect and Database@Azure, OpenAI can run Oracle GPU clusters directly through Microsoft’s Azure environment, combining compute and database proximity for ultra-low latency AI training. This collaboration has effectively positioned Oracle as a primary backbone for global AI workloads, granting it a recurring cloud revenue pipeline unseen in its 47-year history.
To fulfill its commitments, Oracle has embarked on an unprecedented buildout. The company raised $18 billion in bonds in September 2025 and is negotiating a further $38 billion debt package to finance massive facilities in Texas and Wisconsin dedicated to AI infrastructure. Management guided FY2026 CapEx at $35 billion, a 91% year-over-year increase, as part of the multiyear Stargate project — a network of ultra-scale data centers co-developed with OpenAI and major hyperscalers. CEO Safra Catz emphasized that these facilities will “anchor Oracle’s position as the indispensable compute layer for global AI.”
Unlike previous eras dominated by single-vendor lock-ins, Oracle’s new multi-cloud strategy has become a strategic differentiator. The company now delivers its Autonomous Database and Exadata Cloud services natively inside Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud. This cross-cloud deployment gives enterprises the flexibility to use Oracle’s database stack without migrating workloads entirely off competing clouds. As of Q1 FY2026, Oracle reported 23 active multicloud database regions, with 47 more under construction, representing 204% growth YoY. Multicloud database revenue has reached an annualized run rate of $2.6 billion, accounting for roughly 21% of total OCI sales.
Beyond infrastructure, Oracle’s Applications Cloud division — including Fusion ERP, NetSuite, HCM, and CRM — delivered steady growth. FY2025 Applications revenue rose 6.7%, while SaaS sub-revenue jumped 10.9%, fueled by double-digit gains in Fusion Cloud ERP (+15.6%) and NetSuite Cloud ERP (+19.4%). With more than 94% of large enterprises adopting cloud-first systems, Oracle’s SaaS ecosystem provides a recurring revenue base that balances the capital intensity of its AI-driven expansion.
Oracle’s balance sheet shows the pressure of rapid expansion but not financial fragility. The company holds $11.01 billion in cash, $82.2 billion in long-term debt, and $9 billion short-term debt, giving it a net-debt position near $80 billion. Free cash flow over the last 12 months turned negative at –$5.9 billion, largely due to $27.4 billion in CapEx, yet operating cash flow rose 13% YoY to $21.5 billion. Oracle’s management paused buybacks but maintained a 0.80% dividend yield, preserving capital for infrastructure spending.
In the global cloud race, Oracle remains smaller than AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, but its trajectory is steep. Market share has expanded from 1% in 2020 to 2.7% in 2025, with projections to surpass 4% by 2028. OCI’s competitive pricing — 43% below the $48.41 market average — and Oracle’s planned 70 public cloud regions enhance its edge in enterprise adoption. In the AI-infrastructure market specifically, Oracle’s vertical integration of hardware, databases, and GPU clusters gives it a cost-efficiency advantage that hyperscalers struggle to match.
Oracle’s operating margin of 31.6% and three-year average of 30.3% rank among the highest in enterprise software. Despite heavy CapEx, management reaffirmed FY2026 total revenue growth guidance of +16% and cloud-specific growth of +77%, with an expected OCI contribution of $8 billion excluding multicloud database. Analysts estimate FY2026 total revenue at $17.5 billion (+17.8%) and model a 5-year CAGR near 24%, more than double historical averages.
At a forward P/E of 57.9×, Oracle trades at a premium to Amazon (46×) and Google (32×), but its AI-linked growth and backlog justify the valuation. Updated DCF models based on these growth trajectories yield a fair value of $327 per share, suggesting ~30% upside from current levels.
Oracle’s rapid expansion brings short-term risks. Rising interest expenses from bond issuances could pressure EPS through FY2026, and dependence on OpenAI introduces concentration risk — estimated to contribute ~28% of Oracle’s 2028 revenue. Yet the company’s multi-cloud model offsets some exposure by diversifying workloads across hyperscalers. Its strategy mirrors that of infrastructure peers like CoreWeave and Nvidia-backed Nebius, but Oracle’s integration depth makes it uniquely positioned for high-margin AI compute contracts.
Oracle is entering an unprecedented growth phase — blending AI infrastructure, multicloud dominance, and enterprise SaaS resilience into a single accelerated model. The $300 billion OpenAI agreement, 77% OCI growth target, and $35 billion CapEx buildout mark the structural foundation of its next decade. Despite near-term free-cash-flow pressure and debt expansion, Oracle’s execution, backlog visibility, and entrenched enterprise footprint point toward a sustained multi-year uptrend.
Verdict: Buy (Target $327.11) — Oracle’s valuation re-rating remains incomplete as the company cements its status as a global AI and cloud infrastructure powerhouse.
That’s TradingNEWS.com