As Oracle’s cloud growth continues to accelerate even as its revenue base gets significantly larger, the company is also paving the way for continued hypergrowth well into the future as it added a stunning $85 billion to its backlog in Q4, with RPO up 363% to $638 billion.
For Q4, cloud revenue was up 47% to $9.9 billion, highlighted by:
- cloud infrastructure up 93% to $5.8 billion;
- Multicloud AI Database revenue jumped 404%, making it Oracle’s “fastest-growing business ever”;
- cloud-application revenue rose 10% to $4.1 billion; and
- “prepaid and customer-supplied hardware portions of our large AI contracts now total $75 billion,” Oracle said, which “substantially reduces the amount of capital Oracle must raise to build out our AI datacenters.”
As noted above, the Q4 cloud growth rate of 47% extends Oracle’s acceleration for its fiscal year 2026 ended May 31. The combination of this impressive revenue growth plus its other-worldly RPO growth indicates that Oracle continues to win huge chunks of the AI- and cloud-infrastructure market from much-larger competitors Microsoft and AWS.
It also further underscores that while those two companies dominated the early stages of cloud infrastructure, Oracle and Google Cloud are setting a blistering pace in the current chapter —Google Cloud’s Q1 revenue was up 98% to $20 billion, and its backlog doubled to $462 billion.
To quantify that contention with regard to Oracle, here are its quarterly revenue and RPO figures for the four quarters of its fiscal 2026 ended May 31:
| Quarter | Cloud Revenue | RPO |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | $7.2B, +28% | $455B, +359% |
| Q2 | $8.0B, +34% | $523B, +428% |
| Q3 | $8.9B, +44% | $553B, +325% |
| Q4 | $9.9B, +47% | $638B, +363% |
If we strip out the cloud applications business, here are the cloud infrastructure results for those same four quarters:
| Quarter | Cloud Infrastructure |
|---|---|
| Q1 | $3.3B, +55% |
| Q2 | $4.1B, +68% |
| Q3 | $4.9B, +84% |
| Q4 | $5.8B, +93% |
Final Thought
Each quarter, more and more of those staggering RPO numbers will convert over into revenue. That will surely be reflected in Q1 as Oracle offered guidance for cloud-revenue growth of between 57% and 63%, relative to the 47% it just disclosed for Q4.
So while some financial-model-obsessed Wall St. analysts will still be convulsing themselves over Oracle borrowing money to help fund its massive data center buildout to meet that $638 billion in fully contracted future business, Larry Ellison’s company is proving quite conclusively why I moved it ahead of Microsoft and into the #2 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10 in early January.
Nicely done, Oracle!
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