Oracle to report Q4 earnings amid AI trade jitters

Oracle (ORCL) will report its fourth quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, amid recent AI trade fluctuations and as Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) set up their initial public offerings.

The cloud services and infrastructure provider counts OpenAI among its most important customers.

The Sam Altman-helmed AI startup signed a $300 billion, five-year deal with Oracle in 2025, which serves as the linchpin of its AI efforts.

For the fourth quarter, Oracle is expected to report earnings per share (EPS) of $1.97 on revenue of $19 billion, according to a Bloomberg analyst consensus. That would be an improvement from the $1.70 and $15.9 billion the company reported in the same period a year ago.

Oracle’s broader Cloud business, which includes Cloud Applications and Cloud Infrastructure, is expected to reach $9.99 billion.

FILE - This Monday, June 18, 2012, file photo shows Oracle headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. Oracle reports financial results Tuesday, March 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File) — Oracle reports financial results Wednesday. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File) · ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cloud Applications is anticipated to reach $4.16 billion in revenue, while Cloud Infrastructure is projected to come in at $5.17 billion, a whopping 90.8% year-over-year improvement.

Remaining performance obligations (RPOs), a measure of contracts the company has signed, but has yet to deliver on, is expected to reach $589.5 billion, up 327%.

RPOs provide investors with an understanding of overall demand for a company’s cloud services, and have become increasingly important amidst the global AI buildout.

Oracle stock took a stinging hit after announcing its second quarter earnings in December on a weak outlook and concerns related to its spending plans.

But the stock had been on the upswing, after beating Q3 expectations in March and raising 2027 revenue guidance to $90 billion.

Year to date, Oracle was up just 4.8%, as of Tuesday afternoon. But the stock has climbed more than 15% over the last 12 months.

That’s slightly better than Amazon (AMZN), which is up roughly 12% in the last twelve months, and far ahead of Microsoft (MSFT), which is down more than 14% in the last year.

Google (GOOG, GOOGL), however, has easily outperformed its peers thanks to improvements to its Gemini models and Google Cloud Platform growth, which have helped propel the stock more than 103% over the past year.