Oracle

Oracle in the enterprise

As of November 5, 2026. Every figure links to its source; company-reported numbers are labeled as such.

Oracle sells AI to businesses in two very different ways. The fast-growing one is renting out huge amounts of AI computing power through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to AI model builders such as OpenAI and Meta, under multi-year contracts. The steadier one is building AI into the database and business software (finance, HR, supply chain) that companies already run on Oracle. In the quarter ended August 2026, OCI revenue rose 121% to $7.4 billion and total cloud revenue rose 62% to $11.6 billion, while traditional software license revenue fell 3%.

The headline number is Oracle's contracted backlog (remaining performance obligations, or signed revenue not yet recognized): $664 billion as of August 2026, up $209 billion in a year, with more than $30 billion of new AI cloud contracts signed in that quarter alone. OpenAI is the anchor customer, renting 4.5 gigawatts of data-center capacity expected to bring Oracle more than $30 billion a year from fiscal 2028, and Oracle has also confirmed a multi-year deal with Meta. On the software side, Oracle says it has shipped more than 1,000 AI agents inside its business applications, keeps core AI features free, and has begun selling prepaid AI usage bundles to customers such as Aon and Liberty Energy; its databases running inside AWS, Azure and Google Cloud grew revenue 404% in the quarter to May 2026 (all Oracle's figures).

What to watch: funding and margins. Building this capacity is draining cash: free cash flow was about negative $5 billion in the August quarter, and Oracle raised $43 billion of debt plus $5 billion of equity in fiscal 2026 and planned to raise about $40 billion more in fiscal 2027. Oracle has told investors its AI rental business should earn 30-40% gross margins over contract lives, but earlier reporting put margins on GPU rentals in the mid-teens. Backlog is also concentrated in a handful of large AI buyers, so the pace at which that $664 billion turns into revenue (Oracle guides to at least $90 billion of total revenue in fiscal 2027) is the key test.