Oracle Q4 Earnings Preview: Cloud Infrastructure Revenue Expected to Surge 91%
Taylor Wilson
Oracle reports Q4 earnings after Wednesday's close. The Street expects EPS of $1.97 and revenue of $19 billion, with cloud infrastructure up 91% — a crucial test of whether its AI growth narrative can keep delivering.
What is the market watching most closely?
The headline number is cloud infrastructure (OCI) revenue, forecast at $5.17 billion — roughly 90.8% higher year-over-year.
This means → OCI is no longer a side business; it is Oracle's primary growth engine.
Total cloud revenue (including cloud applications) is expected at $9.99 billion, putting cloud on track to account for more than half of overall sales.
Who is footing the bill for this growth?
The biggest driver is OpenAI, which signed a $300 billion, five-year compute contract with Oracle in 2025, locking in long-term revenue.
In plain terms = Oracle bet on AI compute demand, and OpenAI is the single largest card in that hand.
As OpenAI and Anthropic both prepare for IPOs, the market is closely tracking their cloud-compute purchasing pace — any slowdown would force a re-examination of Oracle's growth story.
Why is RPO the hidden key metric?
Remaining performance obligations (RPO) — the total value of contracts signed but not yet delivered — are expected to reach $589.5 billion, up 327% year-over-year.
This means → RPO measures "how much money is still coming in the door." A 327% jump signals exceptionally high order visibility.
In plain terms = revenue tells you "how much was earned this quarter"; RPO tells you "how much work is still in the queue." In an AI infrastructure build-out cycle, the queue is the more telling number for sizing up a cloud provider.
Where does the stock stand, and what is priced in?
Oracle is up about 4.8% year-to-date and over 15% in the past twelve months — slightly ahead of Amazon (roughly +12%) but far behind Google (roughly +103%).
This reflects a market that is "half-convinced" by Oracle's AI narrative — directionally bullish, but not yet willing to assign a Google-tier valuation premium.
Last quarter (Q3) beat expectations and lifted the FY2027 revenue guide to $90 billion, repairing some of the damage from the weak Q2 outlook in December. Whether Q4 can sustain that beat-and-raise momentum is the key checkpoint for the growth curve.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.