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.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore recent remarks from Larry Ellison about Oracle’s new billion-dollar deals.
Highlights
00:09 — I want to talk today about some interesting revelations from chairman Larry Ellison. He was talking to a group of financial analysts about his belief in the company’s ability to hit its fiscal 2026 $65 billion target. They’re adding deals based on this category of cloud-based AI training.
01:03 — Before the AI phenomenon a year ago, Oracle’s largest customer paid Oracle about $120 million dollars a year. Ellison said it’s now got customers coming in every quarter and offering it billion-dollar deals.
01:33 — He said either Microsoft, Google Cloud, or AWS came to Oracle and said, “Hey, we would like to pay you $1.5 billion to use your cloud infrastructure for our AI training.” NVIDIA, Cohere, X.AI could have picked any cloud to do their own AI training. They picked Oracle.
02:28 — Larry added that Oracle is now also selling to countries, in addition to companies. Countries are coming in looking at Oracle’s healthcare capabilities in the cloud, wanting to be able to set up gene sequencing databases for entire country populations.
03:50 — He said, it’s going to be very strange if it goes through a quarter and doesn’t add at least one new billion-dollar deal. This is something I have just not heard from any other executive. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not happening at other companies.
04:38 — I have plenty of faith outside of Oracle. I have plenty of faith in my contention that the cloud is the greatest growth market the world has ever known. This GenAI phenomenon and things like Ellison has described only solidify that position.
