While Oracle is likely to deliver eye-popping cloud-revenue and RPO hypergrowth in tomorrow’s fiscal-Q3 results, Larry Ellison’s company will probably not quite surpass Google Cloud’s 48% Q4 growth rate that made it the world’s hottest hyperscaler by far.
And while I’ll be looking very closely at Oracle’s cloud-revenue numbers for Q3 (its fiscal year runs June 1 through May 31), the numbers of even greater interest to me will be Oracle’s RPO growth rate and total because those are powerful indications of where customers are investing deeply for their AI-powered futures.
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RPO, or remaining performance obligation, represents future business that’s fully contracted — and guaranteed — that has not yet been recognized as revenue. Oracle and Microsoft use the RPO terminology, while Google Cloud and AWS refer to their precise future outlook as “backlog.”
Here are my projections for several key Oracle Q3 numbers — and for context, I’ve paired those up with the comparable results from Q2.
| Metric | My Q3 Projections | Q2 Results |
|---|---|---|
| RPO | $582B, +349% | $523B, +438% |
| RPO Incremental Revenue | $59B | $68B |
| Cloud Revenue (Infra + Apps) | $8.9B, +44% | $8.0B, +34% |
| Cloud Infrastructure | $4.8B, +78% | $4.1B, +68% |
| Cloud Applications | $4.1B, +13% | $3.9B, +11% |
Let me share a little thinking inside those projections:
- RPO: There’s been a lot of discussion around Oracle’s stunning RPO growth, with much of that being incorrect presumptions that all or almost all of that surge is tied to Oracle’s huge AI-training deal with OpenAI. While that $300-billion deal certainly takes up a lot of space in Oracle’s RPO total, plenty of future business is coming from other customers as well. Last quarter (Q2), Oracle added $68 billion in RPO from Meta, Nvidia, and others not named OpenAI. I’m expecting a slightly lower quarter-over-quarter jump for Q3 — $59 billion versus Q2’s $68 billion — but would not be surprised if Oracle yet again posts another blowout surge in RPO.
- Cloud Infrastructure: As some of that staggering RPO total gets converted into revenue, the vast majority will fall into this category — and I’m expecting Oracle to post a sharply higher cloud-infrastructure growth rate for Q3 than it delivered in Q2.
- Cloud Applications: The enterprise-apps marketplace is still in a bit of a head-spinning phase thanks to all the “SaaSpocalypse” nuttiness swirling around, but Oracle is doing a superb job of fusing new agentic AI capabilities into its applications. And those apps include not only horizontal standards such as Fusion Cloud ERP and Fusion Cloud HCM but also Oracle’s fast-growing industry-specific apps.
Final thought
Several weeks ago, Google Cloud set a remarkably high bar for the entire cohort of fast-growing hyperscalers when it posted a 48% spike in revenue to $17.7 billion. And Oracle, behind its booming AI-infrastructure business, will certainly give Google Cloud’s 48% a run but will, I believe, fall a bit short.
Huge growth numbers tied inextricably to huge opportunities for customer innovation and success — that is very clearly the state of the market here in early 2026 in the Cloud Wars.
Buckle up!
