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 explore a stunning milestone in the AI economy: Oracle has surpassed Disney, Goldman Sachs, and Uber in combined market value, hitting $605B.
Highlights
00:21 — Businesses are realizing that to be competitive in the future, all sorts of businesses are going to have to become AI-fluent. Not the underlying deep technology, but rather: How is this going to help improve my business? An example of this is to look at company valuations. I want to compare Oracle with three world-class brands: Disney, Goldman Sachs, and Uber.
01:08 — The public values Oracle more than the combined market caps of Disney, Goldman Sachs, and Uber. Here are the numbers: Oracle’s market cap, about $605 billion. Disney’s market cap: $203.3B, Goldman Sachs: $203.2B, and Uber: $191.7B. Add those up,$598B. Yet Oracle’s market cap is higher than the combined total of these three by several billion dollars.
02:26 — In the Cloud Wars Top 10, you’ve got three companies with much bigger market caps than Oracle: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (Alphabet). Again, Oracle is doing extremely well, but it’s by no means the biggest. Yet when compared to those three iconic brands from different industries, it is now valued more highly.
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03:13 — Let me explain why I believe the AI economy is taking hold. First, CEOs are leading the charge on AI initiatives. We’re also seeing AI permeate across entire organizations. It’s not just for this or that department. It’s an end-to-end opportunity. Businesses can tie together all their departments and functions using AI to increase organizational effectiveness.
04:18 — Economically, AI is now affordable and rapidly becoming even more so. A big concern 12–18 months ago was the high cost — large language models were seen as expensive and resource-heavy, affordable only to wealthy companies and governments. People feared a digital divide, etc. It’s becoming very affordable.
05:13 — As business leaders, we’ve all got to think about this differently. One of my heroes is the French physicist Madame Marie Curie. She liked to say, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” So I’ll leave you with this question: Is your mind prepared — not for the technology around AI — but for how your organization will handle it? Are you getting ahead of the curve, or are you being left behind?
