
Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down how Oracle’s explosive RPO growth could position it to overtake Google Cloud as the fastest-growing cloud vendor.
Highlights
00:27 — For quite some time, Google Cloud has held the number one spot in the Cloud Wars Top 10 Growth Chart. I think there’s a chance this week that Oracle could push Google Cloud out of that top spot. RPO numbers for Oracle have been booming.
01:14 — Over time, that contracted business begins to move through and become recognized as revenue. And I think we’re going to start to see some of that impact here on Wednesday, June 11, when Oracle reports its numbers for its fiscal year ended May 31 and Q4 as well. I think it has a great chance to overtake Google Cloud as number one on the Cloud Wars Growth Chart.

AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.
02:42 — Oracle, Google Cloud, AWS, and to some extent, Microsoft have all indicated that they have more demand than they have data center capacity to meet that. So I don’t think there’s any sign of softness from customers for cloud and AI services. Jensen Huang coined the term AI factories, and really, that’s what this new generation of data centers are all about.
03:20 — I don’t think there’s ever been a physical build-out of this scale for something like this. These factories are going to create the power behind the AI revolution sweeping the global economy. These things are immense in size, the expense that goes into them, the power needs, the water, the regulatory issues. It’s a remarkable thing.
04:07 — Don’t forget, SAP has been doing pretty well too. It reported 25% growth in Q1. So it’s interesting — of the three fastest-growing, we’ve got two of these so-called legacy companies, Oracle and SAP, along with Google Cloud, one of the new kids. Fascinating times, lots of great choices for customers out there.