Oracle touts AI as major driver of Q3 gains

Oracle’s latest financial report boasts substantial increases in revenue, net income, and earnings per share, largely thanks to cloud sales, which the company was quick to credit to the rise of AI.

The report for Q3 of fiscal 2024, released yesterday, said that Oracle had signed multiple large-scale cloud infrastructure contracts in the previous three months, with no end in sight, as CEO Safra Catz touted the company’s bright prospects in cloud.

“We expect to continue receiving large contracts reserving cloud infrastructure capacity because the demand for our Gen2 AI infrastructure substantially exceeds supply,” she said, in a statement. “Despite the fact that we are opening new and expanding existing cloud data centers very, very rapidly.”

In the past year, the company has expanded its cloud footprint considerably, announcing plans to enhance its Middle East cloud region, as well as in Africa and in Mexico, and was the first vendor to open a cloud region in Serbia and in Colombia, among other global cloud expansion plans.

The company, which previously highlighted Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) demand for AI workloads as a chief driver of financial gains a year ago, said OCI, autonomous database, and strategic cloud applications pushed service license and support revenue up 11%, to $10 billion, for Q3 2024, while applications subscription revenues also rose by double digits, by 10% to $4.6 billion.

Part of the move to Oracle’s Gen2 cloud infrastructure can be explained by the transitioning of many of the company’s Cerner health sciences customers to that platform, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said.

“In Q4, Oracle will start delivering its completely new Ambulatory Clinic Cloud Application Suite to these same customers,” he noted.

That’s an important step forward, said Ellison, because the costs of running OCI are considerably lower than those of running the dedicated Cerner data center, and applications can be updated more regularly, along Oracle’s usual three-month schedule.

It’s unquestionably an encouraging quarterly report for Oracle, whose partnerships with Nvidia, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers create an understandable momentum in the company’s infrastructure service, according to Eric Newmark, IDC group vice president. But, Newmark said, it’s difficult to square Oracle’s hyping up of its AI credentials from the reality.

“No doubt that AI is driving increased demand for cloud, but I’m still unclear as to why AI is a strategic advantage for them versus other vendors,” he  said. “I’ve been asking them for a year about how AI will drive revenue growth for them and they’ve provided no concrete answers. They also don’t yet have any direct pricing strategy around how to monetize AI.”