Oracle’s $300B OpenAI deal lifts Ellison past Musk

Oracle’s stock jumped in value more than 40% on Wednesday, lifting the company’s share price to a record high and placing the company in striking distance of a trillion-dollar market value. The surge also sent Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison’s wealth soaring, narrowing the gap between him and Elon Musk in the contest to be the world’s richest person.

The price rise followed Oracle’s disclosure of four multi-billion-dollar contracts tied to the demand for computing power in artificial intelligence. Companies training and running advanced models – like OpenAI and xAI – are pouring money into cloud infrastructure, fuelling a wave of spending in the industry.

By midday trading, Oracle shares had climbed nearly 37% to US$345.69. The gains add about US$234 billion to Oracle’s market capitalisation, bringing the company’s total value to around US$913 billion – in reach of the trillion-dollar milestone that only a handful of firms, including Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, have crossed.

Momentum picked up further after the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI signed a contract worth roughly US$300 billion with Oracle. The deal, spread over five years, is one of the largest cloud agreements on record. According to the report, the bulk of Oracle’s new revenue outlined on Tuesday comes from this arrangement. Oracle declined to comment, and OpenAI did not respond to questions from Reuters.

Ellison, who owns about 41% of Oracle, saw his fortune rise by around US$100 billion to US$392.6 billion, based on Forbes‘ estimates. Musk’s wealth, currently valued at US$439.9 billion, still leads, but the gap has narrowed considerably. Investors are watching whether Ellison’s net worth could soon surpass Musk’s if Oracle stock continues to climb.

Investors have been steadily rotating into AI-focused cloud stocks, betting on the out-sized growth potential of companies supplying the infrastructure behind the technology. Oracle’s shares are now up 45% since the start of the year, and many credit Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison for positioning the company to benefit from AI spending. The stock has outpaced both the S&P 500 and the cluster of tech giants known as the Magnificent Seven.

On a post-earnings call, CEO Safra Catz pointed to more growth ahead. “Over the next few months, we expect to sign up several additional multi-billion-dollar customers and RPO is likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars,” she said.

The broader cloud market is still dominated by Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud, which together control about 65% of the global cloud market. Oracle, where Ellison remains the largest shareholder, competes alongside Alibaba and CoreWeave for the remaining slice. Oracle has gained attention by striking deals with rivals, boosting both its cloud footprint and Ellison’s standing in the industry. Partnerships with Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft now allow its customers to run Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) alongside native services, and revenue from these arrangements rose more than sixteen-fold in the first quarter.

Oracle’s growing role in AI infrastructure has also tied it to large projects outside its own network. Analysts highlighted the company’s involvement in Stargate, a SoftBank and OpenAI-led initiative that could, were it to happen, channel as much as US$500 billion into data centre development. For Ellison, who has long pushed Oracle deeper into cloud computing, Stargate represents a financial and strategic win. Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Melius Research, said the latest revenue figures now include contributions from Stargate and “two other big AI players,” which he argued means long-term revenues could extend well after 2026.

The company also counts Elon Musk’s xAI among its customers. That link underscores Ellison’s ties to Musk, who has often turned to him for support in technology ventures.

Oracle’s rally spilt over into other corners of the market. Chipmakers Nvidia, Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices, which supply the semiconductors used in large data centres, saw their stocks climb between 2% and 8%. Shares of CoreWeave, another competitor in cloud services, rose about 15%.

At the time of writing, Oracle is trading at share valuations close to peers. Its stock is priced at about 33 times projected 12-month earnings, compared with 32 times for Amazon and 31 times for Microsoft. Investors appear willing to pay a premium on expectations that Oracle’s recent contracts will keep revenue growth strong in the years ahead.

(Photo by BoliviaInteligente)

See also: Oracle integrates GPT-5 into databases and cloud apps

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