Joerg Hiller
Mar 10, 2026 21:09
Oracle reports 22% revenue growth and 44% cloud surge in Q3 FY26, raises FY27 guidance to $90B as RPO explodes 325% to $553B on AI contracts.
Oracle crushed Wall Street expectations Tuesday, posting $17.2 billion in Q3 fiscal 2026 revenue—a 22% year-over-year jump that marks the company’s strongest organic growth in over 15 years. Shares climbed 2.8% to $152.56 in after-hours trading, pushing the database giant’s market cap to $429.5 billion.
The numbers tell a clear story of AI-driven momentum. Cloud revenue surged 44% to $8.9 billion, beating analyst projections that topped out at 44% growth. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $1.79, well above the $1.70 consensus estimate and representing 21% growth from the year-ago quarter.
RPO Explodes on AI Contracts
The real headline sits in Oracle’s remaining performance obligations, which ballooned 325% year-over-year to $553 billion—up $29 billion from last quarter alone. Management attributed most of this growth to large-scale AI contracts with an interesting twist: Oracle claims it won’t need additional financing to support these deals.
How? Most equipment gets funded through customer prepayments for GPU purchases, or customers buy the GPUs directly and supply them to Oracle. That structure insulates the company from the free cash flow concerns that plagued previous quarters when heavy capex spending raised eyebrows.
$30B Raised in Days
Speaking of capital, Oracle moved fast on its February announcement to raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity financing. Within days, the company secured $30 billion through investment-grade bonds and mandatory convertible preferred stock. The order book was “substantially oversubscribed,” according to the release. The at-the-market equity portion hasn’t started yet.
The company maintained its FY26 guidance at $67 billion in revenue with $50 billion in capital expenditures. More notably, Oracle bumped FY27 total revenue guidance to $90 billion—a 34% increase from this year’s target.
AI Reshaping Internal Operations
Beyond selling AI infrastructure, Oracle is drinking its own champagne. The company disclosed it’s restructuring product development teams into “smaller, more agile and productive groups” using AI code generation tools. The pitch: building more SaaS applications for more industries at lower cost, making Oracle’s application suites “more competitive and more profitable.”
Q4 guidance calls for 19-21% revenue growth and cloud revenue growth between 46-50%, with non-GAAP EPS expected at $1.96-$2.00. The dividend stays at $0.50 per share, payable April 24 to shareholders of record on April 9.
For investors tracking the AI infrastructure buildout, Oracle’s quarter demonstrates that demand continues outpacing supply. Management explicitly stated these dynamics position the company to “comfortably meet and likely exceed” revenue growth forecasts through FY27 and beyond. The question now: can the hyperscaler competition from AWS and Microsoft Azure keep pace with Oracle’s aggressive expansion?
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