Oracle Stock Rises Further After Best Day Since 1992

Oracle (ORCL) shares advanced in premarket trading Thursday, a day after skyrocketing 36% in their best session since 1992.

The shares soared after the cloud computing and software giant announced after the closing bell Tuesday a substantial backlog that suggested the AI spending boom has legs. The surge briefly lifted the net worth of chair and co-founder Larry Ellison above that of Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg, temporarily making the 81-year-old database pioneer the richest person in the world.

Oracle said Tuesday that its backlog swelled to $455 billion, more than quadrupling from a year ago after it added four multibillion-dollar contracts in its fiscal first quarter on the back of booming demand for AI infrastructure. One of those customers could be ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which according to The Wall Street Journal inked a deal to buy $300 billion in computing power from Oracle over roughly five years.

Oracle’s bullish guidance for cloud revenue growth has sent analysts rushing to lift their price targets for the stock.

“The scale of the backlog—$455b, with $317b of deals added in 1Q/Aug alone—is so materially above Street estimates and drives such a material upward revision to FY28+ estimates that the stock deserves to re-rate materially higher, turning Oracle into perhaps the biggest large-cap growth acceleration story in all of tech,” UBS analysts said in a note as they raised their price target to $360.

Oracle shares, which have nearly doubled this year to $328.33 entering Thursday, are rising a further 1.5% less than an hour before the bell.