- Oracle shares are set for their best year since 1999 after a 75% surge.
- The enterprise-computing stock has benefited from strong demand for cloud and AI infrastructure.
- Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's personal fortune has surged .
Oracle has surged 75% since January, putting the stock on track for its best year since a tripling in 1999 during the dot-com boom.
The enterprise-computing giant's share price has jumped from a low of about $60 in late 2022 to about $180, boosting Oracle's market value from below $165 billion to north of $500 billion.
It's now worth almost as much as Exxon Mobil ($518 billion), and more valuable than Mastercard ($489 billion), Costco ($431 billion), or Netflix ($379 billion).
Oracle's soaring stock price has boosted the net worth of Larry Ellison, who cofounded the company and is chief technology officer. His holding of more than 40% puts him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list worth $227 billion, second only to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $330 billion.
Oracle provides all manner of software and hardware for businesses, but its cloud applications and infrastructure are fueling its growth as companies such as Tesla that are training large language models pay up for processing power.
The company was founded in 1977 but is still growing at a good clip. Net income jumped by 23% to $10.5 billion in the year ended May, fueled by 12% sales growth in the cloud services and license support division, which generated nearly 75% of its revenues.
Oracle signed the largest sales contracts in its history last year as it tapped into "enormous demand" for training LLMs, CEO Safra Catz said in the fourth-quarter earnings release. She said the client list included OpenAI and its flagship ChatGPT model, which kickstarted the AI boom.
Catz also predicted revenue growth would accelerate from 6% to double digits this financial year. That's partly because Oracle is working with Microsoft and Google to interconnect their respective clouds, which Ellison said would help to "turbocharge our cloud database growth."
Oracle has flown under the radar this year compared to Nvidia. The chipmaker's stock has tripled in the past year and it now rivals Apple as the world's most valuable company. Yet Oracle is still headed for its best annual stock performance in a quarter of a century — and its bosses are promising there's more to come.