Oracle’s inventory is lastly catching up with its speak about cloud, fueled by surging infrastructure and AI demand. In its recent Q4 2025 earnings statement, the 46-year-old database big stunned Wall Road with an 11% bounce in income (to $15.9 billion) and bullish forecasts for the yr forward. Oracle’s inventory promptly loved its greatest week since 2001, leaping 24%. It’s comparatively straightforward to please (and idiot) traders, however there’s actual substance in that 11% bounce, and that substance is, at its basis, all about information.

That is new for Oracle. I and others have criticized the corporate for being too gradual to embrace cloud. In consequence, each Microsoft Azure and Amazon Internet Providers pulled forward of Oracle in database income a number of years again as cloud turned central to enterprise technique.

Oracle, nonetheless, discovered a workaround.

For many years, Oracle Database has been the guts of the enterprise. It’s the system of report for a lot of the world’s most crucial information. As an alternative of competing head-on with the likes of OpenAI and Google on basis fashions, Oracle is providing one thing way more sensible to its enterprise prospects: the power to run AI securely on their very own information, inside their very own cloud surroundings. The brand new Oracle Database 23ai is a testomony to this technique, integrating AI capabilities instantly into the database in order that firms can get insights from their information with out having to ship it off to a third-party service.

It’s good, nevertheless it’s additionally not sufficient. Sustaining Oracle’s newfound momentum could require Oracle to reach an space the place it has traditionally struggled: profitable over builders. Builders, in any case, are the individuals constructing the functions that can draw on all that Oracle information.

Cloud-based AI favors database distributors

Large language models (LLMs) have wowed us for the previous few years with all they may do with huge portions of publicly accessible information (even when the unwitting information suppliers, like Reddit, haven’t at all times been blissful about that function). They’ve began to stumble, nonetheless, en path to true enterprise adoption, hampered by safety issues and the fact that as knowledgeable as they’re by the web, they’re extremely dumb on the subject of a given enterprise as a result of they’ve zero entry to that information. Firms have tried to get round this downside with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and different ways, however the true bonanza is ready for the businesses that may assist enterprises apply AI to their information with out having that information depart their secured infrastructure, whether or not working on premises or within the cloud.

Just a few distributors are figuring it out. Certainly, I’ve had a front-row seat to this phenomenon at MongoDB, the place firms are discovering it helpful to retailer and search vector embeddings alongside operational information. Oracle is seemingly discovering one thing comparable, as famous on its earnings name, and is lastly spending large on information facilities to maintain up with rising demand ($21 billion this yr, which is more than 10 times what it was just four years ago).

Unsurprisingly, Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison couldn’t resist a little bit of grandstanding on the earnings name, successfully arguing that on the subject of enterprise AI, Oracle has a home-field benefit. “These different firms say they’ve all the information, to allow them to do AI very well…. The one downside with that assertion is that they don’t have all the information. We do. Now we have many of the world’s precious information. The overwhelming majority of it’s in an Oracle database.” It’s traditional Ellison swagger, however there’s reality there: Oracle databases stay ubiquitous in massive enterprises, storing troves of business-critical information.

Oracle is leveraging that place by making its database and cloud providers “AI-centric.” Oracle’s pitch is that enterprises can use the information already sitting of their Oracle apps and databases to realize AI-driven insights securely and reliably with out having emigrate every thing to some new (and sure much less safe) AI platform. “We’re the important thing enabler for enterprises to make use of their very own information and AI fashions,” Ellison argues. “Nobody else is doing that…. That is why our database enterprise goes to develop dramatically.”

In Oracle’s view, the true gold rush in enterprise AI isn’t simply hyping up the biggest common AI fashions, however serving to firms apply AI to their very own information. Oracle has additionally been a bit much less Oracle-like by embracing multicloud. Fairly than insisting all workloads run on Oracle’s cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI), the corporate has inked partnerships to make Oracle Database accessible on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For enterprises involved about information sovereignty, latency, or simply avoiding single-vendor lock-in, that’s a horny story.

Nevertheless it’s not but an entire story. For that, Oracle wants to determine builders.

The lacking piece

Eleven years in the past I called out the missing piece in Oracle’s cloud ambitions: “Oracle … has constructed a cloud for its current prospects however not for builders who’re constructing large information, internet of things, cell, and different fashionable functions.” I doubled down on this theme, insisting that Oracle had did not treatment “an nearly full lack of curiosity from builders.”

Plus ça change…

Oracle’s cloud progress to date has come largely from promoting to the CIO, not the developer, signing large offers with firms that already belief Oracle for databases or apps, serving to prospects migrate current Oracle-centric workloads, and so on. That’s a wonderfully legitimate technique (and a profitable one), nevertheless it leaves Oracle underexposed to the grassroots innovation occurring within the broader developer neighborhood. Why does developer enthusiasm matter if Oracle can preserve signing enterprise contracts? As a result of within the cloud period, builders are sometimes the new enterprise kingmakers driving expertise adoption.

Positive, the CIO of a big financial institution may signal a top-down cope with Oracle for an ERP system or database licenses, nevertheless it’s the builders and information scientists who’re dreaming up the following technology of functions—those that don’t even exist but. They’ve a world of cloud choices at their fingertips. In the event that they aren’t pondering of Oracle as a platform to create on, Oracle dangers lacking out on new workloads that aren’t already tied to its legacy footprint.

A modest proposal

It’s not my job to inform Oracle tips on how to get its developer act collectively, however there are some apparent (if tough) issues it could possibly and will do. Oracle doesn’t have to develop into “cool” in a Silicon Valley startup sense, nevertheless it does have to decrease obstacles so {that a} curious engineer or a small crew can readily select Oracle (together with MySQL) for his or her subsequent mission. For instance, years in the past Oracle ceded MySQL’s dominant open supply pole place to Postgres. It’s unclear whether or not the corporate would ever contemplate an open governance mannequin for MySQL, however which may be the one technique to put MySQL on equal footing. MySQL has nice engineering, nevertheless it wants neighborhood.

Much less culturally tough, Oracle must preserve enhancing onboarding and pricing to make it straightforward for builders to select its cloud. One factor that made AWS fashionable with builders was the power to swipe a bank card and get going instantly, with clear usage-based pricing. Oracle has made progress right here. OCI has a free tier and easy pricing for a lot of providers, however it could possibly go additional. For instance, providing beneficiant free credit for startups, particular person developer accounts, or open-source initiatives may additionally seed grassroots adoption.

Oracle must also take a cue from Microsoft and improve its presence in developer communities and conferences, spotlight success tales of “constructed on OCI” startups, and broaden applications that have interaction builders instantly. Oracle has began shifting on this route. At its CloudWorld 2024 convention, Oracle unveiled Oracle Code Assist (an AI-powered programming assistant for Java builders on OCI) and new options in its Oracle Kubernetes Engine to raised assist cloud-native apps and AI workloads. These are welcome additions. The secret’s to get such instruments into builders’ palms and iterate primarily based on suggestions, which could possibly be completed by an emboldened developer advocacy crew.

Lastly, Oracle ought to package deal its distinctive strengths in a means that enables builders to simply faucet into them. For example, Oracle’s experience in databases and information administration could possibly be supplied as developer-friendly providers. The corporate’s new Oracle Database 23c has “AI” options (JSON relational duality, vector search, and so on.) that sound nice, however Oracle wants to make sure a developer can rapidly provision a improvement occasion of this database, load some information, and name an API or driver to start out constructing an AI-powered app. In brief, Oracle ought to make its cool tech simply accessible. If Oracle may give builders a style of what its high-performance cloud and information techniques can do—with no months-long enterprise procurement cycle—some will inevitably be impressed and advocate utilizing Oracle for brand new initiatives.

Oracle is attaining one thing uncommon: a real second act in tech, a long time into its life. By leaning into what it does greatest (databases, enterprise functions, and now high-performance cloud infrastructure) Oracle has made itself a contender within the age of AI. The subsequent check might be whether or not the corporate can broaden its affect past the standard enterprise IT outlets which have at all times been its stronghold. If Oracle can discover a technique to have interaction builders on their very own phrases (with out diluting its enterprise savvy), it may unlock one other degree of progress that makes at the moment’s resurgence look modest.