(Reuters) -Oracle topped fourth-quarter revenue estimates on Monday, boosted by growing demand for its cloud offerings from companies deploying AI, sending its shares up nearly 3% in extended trade.
Revenue for the quarter jumped about 17% to $13.84 billion, beating analysts’ estimates of $13.74 billion, according to Refinitiv.
Oracle’s push into the cloud computing market has started to bear fruit, helped by its acquisition of electronic medical records firm Cerner last year that has helped it better compete with industry giants like Microsoft and Amazon.com.
The cloud and software company has also boosted its AI cloud offerings, including its partnership with Nvidia to make the chip company’s AI software and chips available to Oracle customers via its cloud services.
Analysts believe that given the company’s partnership with Nvidia, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is well-positioned to become a major AI/ML development platform, which could be another leg of emerging growth.
“Companies doing LLM (large language model) development such as Mosaic ML, Adept AI, Cohere plus 30 other AI development companies have recently signed contracts to purchase more than $2 billion of capacity in Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud,” Oracle Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said in a statement.
Revenue at the Austin, Texas-based company’s cloud services and license support unit, its largest, rose to $9.37 billion in the quarter from $7.61 billion a year earlier.
(Reporting by Samrhitha Arunasalam and Raghav Mahobe in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)
