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 unpack how Oracle’s $455B RPO surge signals a massive shift in cloud leadership.
Highlights
00:15 — We see across the Cloud Wars Top 10 an incredible sense of demand from businesses across the world — to help those businesses create their futures. And in fact, we’ve now got, just among the four hyperscalers, a pipeline totaling $1.1 trillion. We’ve got Oracle in the top spot there at $455 billion. Microsoft is number two in the RPO race, $368 billion.
01:17 — So here, I’ve got the four hyperscalers with RPO and the RPO growth rate, then quarterly revenue and quarterly growth rate. Oracle is on the top, its RPO now sits at close to half a trillion dollars, with a growth rate of 359%. Microsoft: $368 billion in RPO, up a whopping 37%, off that huge base. Quarterly revenue for the Microsoft Cloud — almost $47 billion, up 27%.
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.
02:25 — AWS’ RPO is now $195 billion, up about 25%. That’s coming off its Q2 revenue of almost $31 billion, up 17.5%. AWS is growing more slowly than the other hyperscalers. Google Cloud: backlog $106 billion, up 38%. For Q2, Google Cloud revenue at $13.6 billion, up 32%. So it was the fastest-growing in Q1, doing very well here.
03:33 — Now altogether, this adds up to $1.1 trillion. I’m just not used to saying “trillion.” Got to get more used to that as this market gets bigger. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said that there were multiple huge deals that Oracle signed for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and more coming. Catz said that, “We anticipate that in the near future, Oracle’s RPO will reach $500 billion — half a trillion.”
04:32 — Going into the future, as AI comes along and changes so much, RPO — or backlog — gives us a great idea of who the hot companies are coming up. And right now, undisputedly, that is Oracle. The other three companies are doing quite well, but I think AWS has become the “slowpoke” in this sprint that the others are undertaking.
