Oracle as AI capacity landlord

Oracle is being valued more like a seller of artificial intelligence computing capacity than a seller of database software. Oracle’s own numbers now show its cloud infrastructure business growing faster than the rest of the company. (oracle.com) On March 10, 2026, Oracle said fiscal third-quarter cloud infrastructure revenue rose 84% to $4.9 billion, while total revenue rose 22% to $17.2 billion. Remaining performance obligations, a backlog measure, reached $553 billion, up 325% from a year earlier. (oracle.com) Oracle said most of that backlog jump came from large artificial intelligence contracts, and said many of those deals are structured so customers either prepay for graphics processing units or supply the chips themselves. That setup makes Oracle look less like a software licensor and more like a landlord renting out powered, cooled, connected capacity. (oracle.com) The scale of the buildout is measured in gigawatts, not server racks. OpenAI said on July 22, 2025 that it and Oracle agreed to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data-center capacity in the United States, bringing Stargate capacity under development to more than 5 gigawatts and more than 2 million chips. (openai.com) Power has become the bottleneck in that business. Bloom Energy said on April 13, 2026 that Oracle plans to procure up to 2.8 gigawatts of Bloom fuel-cell systems under a master services agreement, with an initial 1.2 gigawatts already contracted for Oracle projects in the United States. (bloomenergy.com) That is a different Oracle from the one investors knew as a company built around databases, maintenance contracts, and enterprise applications. In fiscal 2025, Oracle reported cloud infrastructure revenue of $3.0 billion in its fourth quarter, up 52%, and said it expected cloud infrastructure growth to top 70% in fiscal 2026. (oracle.com) Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said in June 2025 that Oracle had 23 multicloud data centers live and 47 more being built over the next 12 months. Those sites let customers run Oracle databases inside the cloud regions of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, while Oracle builds out its own capacity for larger artificial intelligence workloads. (oracle.com) Oracle has also told investors the expansion will require heavy financing. In the March 2026 earnings release, the company said it had announced plans in February to raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity financing, while saying it did not expect to issue additional bonds beyond that amount in calendar 2026. (oracle.com) The pitch to investors is straightforward: if the scarce asset in artificial intelligence is not software but available power, chips, and data-center floor space, then Oracle wants to own the tollbooth. The risk is just as clear: this model depends on keeping expensive capacity full, delivering sites on time, and finding enough electricity to run them. (oracle.com; openai.com; bloomenergy.com)