While Oracle’s biggest traditional customer spent about $120 million per year with Oracle, the explosive market for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) infrastructure is so lucrative that “it will be an odd quarter when we don’t sign at least a single deal for over a billion dollars in revenue,” chairman Larry Ellison said at a recent meeting with financial analysts.
Even for a guy with a well-earned reputation for saying exactly what he thinks, that’s quite a stunner from Ellison. It was delivered on the last day of Oracle’s recent CloudWorld event in Las Vegas during the day-long Financial Analyst Meeting, during which the final act is Ellison taking unscripted Q&A from analysts for anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes.
Since few executives in this remarkable business have had the impact Ellison has had since founding Oracle 46 years ago, and because Ellison was talking about a subject — GenAI — that is having an extraordinary impact on the lives of billions of people across the globe, I want to share some of Ellison’s verbatim comments on his astonishing forecast that Oracle has entered a phase of growth in which billion-dollar deals every single quarter are the norm.
Hyperscaler Wants to Pay Oracle $1.5 Billion
Speaking of the other three hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS — Ellison said, “One of these three infrustructure companies wanted us to sign a $1.5-billion contract for us to do AI training in our cloud because our prices were lower than their costs. That’s a good sign that I’m not completley delusional about our advantages in AI training,” Ellison said, adding that “We train twice as fast at less than half the cost — and it’s actually much better.”
‘It’s Stunning — Absolutely Stunning‘
“Several companies have signed up for billion-dollar AI deals — it’s stunning. It’s absolutely stunning, and there’s really no end in sight,” Ellison said.
“NVIDIA sells their GPUs to everybody and they’ve got a lot of differentiation but when they decided to actually pick a cloud and do their own work, they picked us. Cohere sells to everybody, and when they decided to do their own training they picked us. X.AI, which I think is going to be astonishingly successful…. they chose Oracle to do their training.”
From Selling to Companies to Selling to Countries
“Normally we say, ‘Oh, we just signed this large contract with this big company.’ But now we’re saying, ‘Oh, we just signed this large contract with this country. We’ve gone from dealing with companies to dealing with countries, where those countries that want their national health service to gene-sequence the entire population.”
‘Oh My God!‘
“You know, it’s certainly beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. And the transactions that we’re getting recently, I mean, I’ll call Safra and I said, ‘Oh my God!’ I mean, we don’t get billion-dollar transactions! Back then, I’d say that I wish we did. But we never got a billion-dollar contract.
“We never got $1-billion customers. But now we get them every quarter.”
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