Oracle has blown the balance of power in the Cloud Wars to Kingdom Come by reporting Q1 RPO has rocketed upward by 359% to $455 billion, dwarfing Microsoft’s latest RPO figure of $366 billion and clearly positioning Oracle as the world’s hottest hyperscaler.
That might seem like an overblown claim to make since Oracle’s fiscal-Q1 cloud revenue rose a respectable but hardly spectacular 28% to $7.2 billion, which means Microsoft’s cloud revenue is almost 7X greater than Oracle’s.
But that’s a sign of what happened last quarter, while RPO is an indicator of future pipeline, growth, and volume. And in the several hundred quarterly reports I’ve seen over the past several years, never but NEVER has any company posted RPO numbers that come anywhere close to Oracle’s for the quarter ended August 31 — so I’ll run them past you one more time because these are official and not typos: RPO up 359% to $455 billion.
And yes, while that’s all future stuff and is not yet business in hand, the stunningly spectacular RPO figures spurred Oracle CEO Safra Catz to project some future cloud-revenue figures that I find to be equally extraordinary:
“As a bit of a preview, we expect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to grow 77% to $18 billion this fiscal year — and then increase to $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion, and $144 billion over the subsequent four years,” Catz said.
“Oracle is off to a brilliant start to FY26.”
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And bear in mind those numbers are just for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure — they don’t include Oracle’s large cloud apps business, which Catz said in June would ultimately become the largest cloud-apps business in the world.
And let me lay out those projected annual OCI revenue figures from Catz in an easier-to-read format:
- FY26: $18 billion, up 77%
- FY27: $32 billion, up 44%
- FY28: $73 billion, up 128%
- FY29: $114 billion, up 56%
- FY30: $144 billion, up 26%
I’ll have lots more on this unprecedented growth projection over the coming week. Meanwhile, hats off to Oracle for a hard-to-believe set of results in the greatest growth market the world has ever known.
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