Dive Brief:
- Despite Wall Street concerns about Oracle’s massive AI infrastructure spending, the company saw revenues boom during the third quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, the company reported Tuesday.
- The cloud and software provider earned $17.2 billion in total revenue during the quarter, up 22% year over year. A major driver of growth was AI infrastructure revenue, which more than tripled year over year during Q3.
- An expanding roster of AI tools is serving as a customer entry point for other Oracle offerings, including its AI data platform, cloud services and industry suites, co-CEO Mike Sicilia told investors during an earnings call Tuesday. “These conversations are about ecosystem automation,” Sicilia said. “They’re not about single apps.”
Dive Insight:
After spending billions last year to expand its compute capacity, Oracle delivered strong third quarter earnings, highlighting significant growth in AI infrastructure revenue.
“Demand for AI infrastructure, both GPU and CPU, continues to exceed supply,” said co-CEO Clay Magouyrk, pointing to the more than half a trillion dollars in remaining performance obligations.
But the company also said it’s reaping the rewards of AI use internally, crediting the technology with helping small engineering teams build three customer experience applications, one of which was used to launch a new website for the company.
“The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly,” Sicilia said. “We are building brand-new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing applications suites.”
The AI rush has buoyed enterprise cloud spending, with global cloud infrastructure service revenues reaching $120 billion during the last quarter of 2025, according to Synergy Research Group. Competition to draw in customers amid ongoing AI adoption remains heated, with the three top hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft and Google, respectively — banking the biggest portions of enterprise dollars.
Still, the gap between Oracle and the rest of the provider field looms large despite its efforts to accelerate revenue, according to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group.
“Oracle has finally gotten serious about doing what it takes to grow,” said Dinsdale in an email to CIO Dive. “The trouble is that the leading cloud providers have been growing like gangbusters for 10 to 15 years now.”
By way of comparison, Oracle’s 2025 cloud infrastructure revenues “are not yet on par with what Amazon achieved in 2017,” Dinsdale said.
“However rapidly it grows,” Dinsdale said, “it will be enormously difficult to meaningfully shift that needle.”
