oracle Shares rose as much as 10% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the software vendor reported quarterly results that beat Wall Street expectations and boosted its fiscal 2027 revenue outlook.
Oracle expects fourth-quarter fiscal year adjusted earnings per share of $1.92 and $1.96, with revenue growth of 19% to 20%. LSEG’s consensus included $1.70 per share and 20% earnings growth.
Here’s how the company performed for the quarter compared to the LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.79 adjusted vs. $1.70 expected Sales: $17.19 billion vs. $16.91 billion expected
Oracle’s overall revenue increased 22% year-over-year in the fiscal third quarter ended Feb. 28, according to a statement. Net income was $3.72 billion, or $1.27 per share, up from $2.94 billion, or $1.02 per share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation expense.
The company reported total cloud revenue of $8.9 billion, including infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS). That number increased 44% and beat the $8.85 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.
Management raised the company’s fiscal 2027 revenue forecast by $1 billion to $90 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $86.6 billion.
Oracle said its cloud infrastructure revenue grew 84% to $4.9 billion, outpacing last quarter’s 68% growth. The company promoted its cloud business with Air France KLM, Lockheed Martin Corp. and SoftBank Corp., among others. Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard’s video game subsidiary.
Oracle’s stock has plunged more than 50% from its September high, along with other software vendors, due to broader concerns about artificial intelligence and Wall Street’s specific concerns about the company’s massive debt that is funding its AI buildout.
“Thankfully, we have these coding tools that allow us to build a comprehensive set of software, agent-based software, to implement and automate complete ecosystems such as healthcare and financial services,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, head of technology and executive chairman, said on a conference call with analysts. “That’s what we do at Oracle. That’s why we think we’re disruptors. That’s why we think the SaaS apocalypse applies to others but not to us.”
As of Tuesday’s close, the stock had fallen 23% in 2026, compared with the S&P 500’s decline of less than 1% over the same period.
Oracle has won large contracts to provide cloud infrastructure for AI companies such as OpenAI, but has less cash on hand than its larger competitors. Amazon And Microsoft.
Currently on loan Nvidia Graphics chips generate smaller margins than software license sales, and Oracle reported negative free cash flow of $13.18 billion in the past 12 months.
During the quarter, Oracle announced plans to raise between $45 billion and $50 billion during the fiscal year to expand the capacity of its cloud infrastructure. Clay Magouyrk, the company’s other CEO, said on a conference call that the company plans to bring more than 10 gigawatts of computing power online over the next three years.
Oracle’s results and backlog show that demand for AI infrastructure continues to soar, so the all-out beat may help calm a nervous investor base, at least for now. Remaining performance obligations more than quadrupled from a year ago to $553 billion, slightly lower than StreetAccount consensus of $556 billion, but the company said it had the capital to support its growth.
“Most of the RPO increase in the third quarter was related to large AI contracts, and Oracle does not believe it is necessary to raise additional funding to support these contracts, as most of the required equipment is either prepaid by customers upfront so Oracle can purchase GPUs, or customers purchase GPUs and supply them to Oracle,” the company said in a statement.
In Abilene, Texas, where Oracle and Crusoe are building OpenAI’s data center project, “two buildings are fully operational and the rest of the campus is on track,” Oracle said in a Sunday X post. The statement came after Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had canceled plans to expand the site, but Oracle said media reports about Abilene were false.
At the end of February, OpenAI announced a $110 funding round with support from Amazon, Nvidia and others.
“Some of the largest consumers of AI cloud capacity have recently significantly strengthened their financial positions,” Oracle said in a statement Tuesday.
Bloomberg reported last week that Oracle was planning job cuts.
“The AI models that generate computer code have become so efficient that we have reorganized our product development teams into smaller, more agile, and more productive groups,” Oracle said in a statement. “With this new AI code generation technology, we can now build more software, faster, with fewer people. Oracle is now building more SaaS applications for more industries, at lower cost.”
—CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
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