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Oracle CORP

ORCL

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$438B Market cap · 2026-10-28

ORCL Update

Oracle rose about 12% intraday on October 28, 2026 as AI infrastructure and cloud-demand sentiment improved and credit-spread concerns…

ORCL $438B
Cestrian Capital Research 2 clicks
@ActAccordingly

PAA Research on X

"That would be PRESUMPTIOUS!" I'm listening to the $ORCL investor day and I found the response to the question about potential vendor/partner financing and whether or not the company has committed/signed deals quite interesting. The tone was defensive and I started to immediately think of Jimmy Cayne. In late 2007, a few months before Bear Stearns blew up they hosted an investor event in NYC to calm the markets following the blow up of 2 hedge funds. I was in the room. An analyst asked about how Bear Stearns planned to manage risk going forward in light of the "unprecedented" events in the capital markets (hedge funds blowing up, subprime defaults, credit spreads widening etc.). Jimmy Cayne responded: "You cannot create a risk model for something that is by definition UNPRECEDENTED". The tone was what I remember most. Defiant, condescending, angry. That's what I heard today with "PRESUMPTIOUS". No $ORCL is not Bear Stearns, but it's obvious to anyone that can read a balance sheet or track CDS, the financial risks for the company are growing rapidly. Negative variance on funding could have massive implications for the company. Assuming they have their financing needs secured from vendor financing or partners would be PRESUMPTIOUS.
@convequity 12 clicks

Convequity on X

$ORCL Spends More of Its Cash Flow on Capex Than $AMZN or $MSFT — Does the Backlog Justify the Stretch? We hold Oracle, so we pulled the numbers from our ABBX dashboard to check whether the contracted backlog supports the heavier spending. Capex intensity (last four quarters) Oracle spent about 161% of operating cash flow on capex (to 31 Aug 2026). Amazon was about 107% and Microsoft about 63% (both to 30 Jun 2026). Oracle put USD 75.7B into capex against USD 46.9B of operating cash flow. Debt and lease load Add borrowings, lease liabilities, and the undiscounted value of leases signed but not yet started. Purchase obligations are excluded for all three. - Oracle: about USD 457B, or 3.6x its USD 125B of borrowings. - Amazon: about 2.9x. - Microsoft: about 11x (its borrowings are small relative to lease commitments). Oracle stands out on size versus cash flow: roughly 9.7x trailing operating cash flow, versus 2.5x at Microsoft and 2.3x at Amazon. The backlog counterweight Oracle’s RPO (remaining performance obligations) is USD 664B — close to Microsoft’s USD 678B commercial RPO, while generating only about a quarter of Microsoft’s operating cash flow. RPO covers about 1.45x Oracle’s debt-plus-leases figure, versus 1.48x at Microsoft. Those contracts provide revenue visibility, though delivery still depends on margins and timing. Amazon’s USD 496B backlog is AWS-only, so it is not a clean comparison. ABBX capacity estimates show Oracle rising from about 4 GW to about 12.8 GW by 2029, Microsoft from 8.5 to 17 GW by 2030, and Amazon from 10.6 to 16 GW by 2028. That implies roughly USD 52B of RPO per planned GW for Oracle versus about USD 40B for Microsoft (rough scale comparison given different RPO scopes and time horizons). Our take The bigger risks at Oracle are timing, execution, and funding rather than a lack of demand. Oracle expects about 13% of its RPO to convert to revenue in the next 12 months while capex is being spent now. Its 12.8 GW figure is an ABBX estimate, not company guidance; it carries ABBX’s lowest confidence of the three, and grid approval is still pending at one or more sites. Oracle also sold USD 20B of stock in FQ1 FY27. We think the backlog justifies holding the position, but sized for funding risk. What we watch: RPO converting to revenue on schedule, new capacity coming online, and whether more equity is needed.
@aleabitoreddit 2 clicks

Serenity on X

Sure... Random train of thoughts on markets now, optics like $LITE / memory + $IREN / Anthropic. On Memory: - Demand visibility on $MU / Samsung / SK Hynix extend into 2030-2031. Samsung has LTAs covering 70% of their capacity into 2031 (likely with SK Hynix type price floors)... and their operating profit is already absurd. There's a consensus that shortage in 2027 will be much more severe than 2026... Even $SNDK expends gross margins to exceed 80% entering 2030. You're going to hear Acer and other CEOs that want memory prices to go down cite bear cases like CXMT/YMTC, and Chinese players. But just looking at supply procurement that $NVDA is doing + hyperscalers, demand visibility is absurd for the next 5 years. And by that time, cumulative FCF coming in from these take/pay + pricing floor contracts might exceed some of their entire marketcaps so it feels like there's some baseline. Near-term is always volatile (IV dropped a ton across $EWY to $DRAM to $MU), so people with call options likely got nuked, along with underlying prices. But if Samsung is 3x 2027E, has 5 year LTAs with 70% of capacity committed from hyperscalers, and price floors, it's kinda hard to see these names suffer a sustained crash... For optics: - $LITE is literally sold out into 2029, starting discussions into 2030. With demand visibility lasting into 2031… with hyperscalers largely funding the capacity buildout. Their 2028 Greensboro fab expansion was ~$5B in UHP laser capacity revenue alone, yet it’s basically allocated toward $NVDA (50%+ with options for more) and co from channel checks. Existing supply chain bottlenecks are extremely severe as optical content/XPU skyrockets entering 2027-2028. So everything from DSPs/TIAs, photodiodes, lasers, InP/SOI substrates, wafers (epi, SOI, etc) are expected to go brrr. And what does that imply to anyone else with enormous amounts of capacity coming online like $AAOI + $SIVE + $MTSI capacity expansion in 2027? Or other players like Sumitomo / Furukawa? But again it's not quite the same situation as memory since the BOM % is extremely low in a cluster... If micron/samsung raised another 2000% hyperscalers would go bankrupt. But doing that for InP substrates seems possible. Or a 100% increase on CW laser content. I actually thought $LITE was overvalued at $100B+ MC, relative to capacity expansion on your smaller optical players to their respective MCs. So I chose to position accordingly (But lumentum does deserve premiums for demand visibility). For the companies leading the charge like $NVDA / $AVGO / $MRVL: - Nvidia has 70% forward revenue growth FY2028 which is supply constrained growth. - Broadcom 100% Y/Y for 2027/2028 which is also supply constrained growth. - Marvell FY2031 upgraded guidance to $70B-$90B from $46B analyst projections... They all seem to be very happy.... and read through on demand for next 2-3 years is enormous (also echoing what $INTC CEO said today on the panel with $AVGO CEO). So you have overwhelming growth on memory + photonics + from the leaders... But the nuance is not everything in the AI supply chain get the same economic benefit. HBM/Laser/CPU/MLCC and other players in the bottlenecks look to be printing money. And seem to be the largest beneficiaries of the current bottlenecks. Test players are also getting price hikes + capacity allocated by players like $NVDA, but economic impact seems a tad lower than other players since forward P/E for many I modeled were still in the 45x+ range even if you hiked prices like 10-30%. As for capex intensive players... there's some like $IREN ($25-30B for 2027) that despite a deal with Anthropic ended up dropping. I don't think markets seem to appreciate players spending a lot of money + ongoing financing (think they're like halfway through their $6B ATM). Just some hopium for $IREN investors, $NBIS also signed a deal with $META at the start of the year (but markets didn't care at all, since Nebius dropped to ~$70-80 at the lowest point?). But did 6 months later, as the time to revenue inflection gets closer and you're past the ATM/capex window, markets would likely care more. I don't think it's irrational but at the same time, the fundamentals have improved from Mirantis acquisition to others. I also think it was known for awhile it was either OpenAI/Anthropic from CEO comments earlier too? But either way to be a more risk-off environment where funds seem to be rotating to larger names as a flight to safety. $CRWD / $PLTR as just two example, but my take is that the valuations of these rotations are reaching clown levels. And that certain AI supply chain beneficiaries in comparison are undervalued now. I was thinking markets would just rotate to names that are extremely profitable like Samsung or names that have <2X P/E, so it was surprising to see $KOSPI and some legacy memory players get sold off today. Since all of this is colliding with uncertainty about sht macro environments and renewed sustainability concern of AI capex/commitments from frontier labs like OpenAI/Anthropic from due to that FT piece recently. I've always been sounding the alarm about the contractual backlog OpenAI has with $CBRS, $MSFT, $ORCL and others earlier in the year. But OpenAI did just raise $122B or so , so I don't quite think they're at risk of going down anytime soon. I also don't think overall capex can just exponentially go up, but even if it stalls / hovers around a certain point or even drops... Capex toward certain areas like optics will still explode as hyperscalers fight over allocations when CPO scale up comes about, but might drop in others where more capacity comes online like test or DRAM. So it's a lot more nuanced than capex down = everything down or vice versa. I also slightly agree with community agreements that open weight models wouldn't lessen demand on AI infrastructure (otherwise $NVDA wouldn't be funneling funds into Reflection), but all the contractual obligations that Anthropic has might get messy if their models/company get cannibalized. Either way, I'd expect some of these frontier lab valuations to likely compress but I do think Jensen knows what he's doing though to avoid contagion. But basically: - Extremely difficult market now, can't just throw money at any AI supply chain company like $GLW and expect it to go up. There's cause for concern of rate hikes mixed with financing per $AVGO CEO but not to the point you just blindly sell off everything. Also I think markets are stupid and ties baskets together so that leads to mispricing + individual buying opportunities with certain chokepoints too. If capacity + demand is visible and forward p/e compresses like $AAOI to single digits off hundreds or thousands of percent growth from hyperscalers off $471m transceiver revenues and hundreds of thousands of monthly ELSFP capacity. Or $SIVE coming online with 100M+ laser capacity + multiple foundries with ASP hikes on lasers. I wouldn't lump them into other AI supply chain names in IP like $RMBS or others. My take is that AI supply chain beneficiaries with closer inflection points, demand visibility, and forward P/E compressing due to economic leverage would likely outperform medium term despite current volatility. TLDR: - Memory strongest risk/adjusted return with LTAs + pricing floors extending to 2030's + buybacks. - My opinion is that optical supercycle for 2027-2028 with CPO/NPO is going to look absurd relative to capacity coming online of smaller suppliers. - Overwhelming fundamentals/growth colliding with sht macro + media scares - Markets are stupid and groups things in baskets and sells them all off together or buys overvalued names, creating short/long opportunities I'd give a prayer to people on short term options given underlying drop + IV decline, but there could be a reversal... who knows. Most valuable thing right now is time.
@convequity 6 clicks

Convequity on X

OpenAI and Anthropic will rent most of the AI capacity they plan, but mainly from the big clouds rather than the listed neoclouds Convequity's AI Bubble Barometer (ABBX) tracks the data-centre capacity each company plans and how much of it it expects to rent from partners rather than own. 1. OpenAI plans 21.2 GW, of which 18.0 GW is to be supplied by partners. Anthropic plans 13.8 GW, all of it from partners. Together the two labs plan to rent 31.8 GW. 2. That is 2.8 times the 11.2 GW that the five hyperscalers, $MSFT, $AMZN, $GOOGL, $META and $ORCL, plan to rent from others. 3. The labs' named suppliers are mostly AWS, Oracle, Google, Azure and SB Energy. CoreWeave, a listed neocloud, and Nscale, a private one, appear on the lists, but the bulk of the 31.8 GW is not with listed neoclouds. 4. The seven listed neoclouds, $CRWV, $NBIS, $IREN, $APLD, $CORZ, $CIFR and $BTDR, plan to build 33.62 GW of their own. Much of that is gross site power rather than contracted IT capacity. 5. The labs are also behind most of the recent growth in AI capacity plans. Since 14 Jul, the total capacity that the 15 ABBX companies say they plan to have has risen by 22.19 GW, from 131.23 GW to 153.42 GW on 7 Oct. OpenAI and Anthropic raising their own plans accounts for 13.7 GW of that rise (62%). We think the labs' rental demand mainly supports $AMZN, $ORCL, $GOOGL and $MSFT. The neoclouds will need to fill their pipelines largely with other customers, including the hyperscalers' own 11.2 GW of planned rentals, so we would not read the labs' plans as demand for the neoclouds.
@convequity 4 clicks

Convequity on X

Neoclouds trade at 2.6x invested capital, less than half the hyperscalers' 6.1x The seven neoclouds in Convequity's AI Bubble Barometer (ABBX), $CRWV, $NBIS, $IREN, $APLD, $CORZ, $CIFR and $BTDR, lost 7.2% of their combined enterprise value this week, from $190.2B at the 2 Oct close to $176.5B at the 9 Oct close. Over the same week the five hyperscalers, $MSFT, $AMZN, $GOOGL, $META and $ORCL, gained 2.4%, from $13,316B to $13,637B. 1. Enterprise value divided by invested capital (EV/IC) at the 9 Oct close was 2.6x for the neoclouds and 6.1x for the hyperscalers. At the 2 Oct close it was 2.8x and 6.0x. 2. ABBX estimates the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) at 14.6% for the neoclouds and 9.7% for the hyperscalers. 3. At the 9 Oct close, neocloud share prices were 20% to 45% below each stock's best Friday close since 17 Jul: CIFR −44.5%, CORZ −33.3%, BTDR −25.8%, IREN −24.6%, APLD −24.1%, CRWV −22.0% and NBIS −20.4%. Among the hyperscalers, ORCL was 10.9% below its best, AMZN and META 4.4% and GOOGL 1.3%, while MSFT closed above its best. We think most of the discount reflects the neoclouds' higher cost of capital rather than a mispricing. We would not call 2.6x cheap until they report their July to September backlog and customer prepayment figures.
@convequity 1 click

Convequity on X

The $70bn revenue figure reported for OpenAI in late September was a gross-basis comparison number, not OpenAI's own. OpenAI's own run rate, the one it told investors, was approaching $50bn at the end of September. The number that now needs the same scrutiny is Anthropic's, before its IPO. The two labs count partner sales differently. When a customer pays $AMZN or $GOOGL for Claude, Anthropic records the full price as revenue and books the cloud's cut as a cost. OpenAI records only its own share of such sales. The $70bn was OpenAI's number grossed up to Anthropic's method so the two could be compared. Three things follow. 1. OpenAI's revenue did not fall. Its net run rate was approaching $50bn at the end of September. Yet the stocks that fell on Thursday were its suppliers: $ORCL, $CRWV and $NVDA. 2. Anthropic's $65bn run rate at the end of July is a gross figure. On OpenAI's basis it is smaller by whatever the cloud partners keep, and that share has not been disclosed. The claim that Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI rests on two numbers measured differently. 3. Which method applies is an accounting judgement about which company controls the sale to the customer, so Anthropic's prospectus for its planned November IPO may keep the gross figure, with the partners' share inside cost of revenue. That filing will show the cost line. OpenAI, still private, does not have to. In our view Thursday's selling hit the suppliers to the lab whose number did not change. The comparison investors should redo before November is Anthropic's $65bn against OpenAI's $50bn after the cloud partners' share is taken out of both.
@convequity 1 click

Convequity on X

Despite investor doubts, $IREN is worth a small position. The shares have fallen about 17% from their 22 Sep close. The equipment IREN had ordered at 30 June is covered by the cash, committed GPU financing and prepayments it reported on 27 Aug. In the June 2026 quarter customers funded most of its capex. On signed contracts the shares are priced about where $CRWV is. The main risk is that IREN runs GPU clouds worse than its peers. 1. IREN guided FY27 capex (Jul 2026–Jun 2027) at $25–30B on its 27 Aug results call. Its enterprise value is $14.6B at the 5 Oct close. IREN's FY26 results show revenue of $0.7B, of which $0.58B was bitcoin mining. IREN expects to have shut mining down by the end of December 2026. 2. At 30 Jun 2026 IREN had $13.8B of commitments for GPUs and site work, almost all payable by 30 Jun 2027, per its annual report. Orders placed after 30 June are not in that figure. On 27 Aug IREN put its existing cash, committed GPU financing and customer prepayments at about $14B. That covers the 30 June commitments. 3. The other $11–16B of the capex guide is not yet funded. Management targets about $8B more in GPU financing and prepayments for new GPU capacity, and that funding comes with new customer contracts. IREN says it is in late-stage talks for a large share of 2027 capacity. It has not announced any signed contract for that new 2027 capacity. The rest would come from data-center debt, operating cash flow and corporate funding, which includes selling shares. By 14 Aug 2026 IREN had sold about $2.5B of shares under its $6B ATM programme, leaving about $3.5B at that date, per its annual report. It has not reported any sale since. 4. On signed contracts, IREN is priced close to CRWV. On our ABBX dashboard, enterprise value is 0.88x contract value for IREN, 0.74x for CRWV and 1.60x for $NBIS. The contract values are company-reported, and each company measures them differently. IREN reports about $16.6B, of which about $5.1B is cloud service contracts and about $11.4B is GPU lease contracts. CRWV reports a $104.2B revenue backlog. NBIS reports $37.5B of remaining performance obligations. On 27 Aug IREN said its 2026 capacity was largely sold out. It had $4B of contracted annualised revenue run-rate (ARR) for 2026 capacity, which it earns once that capacity is delivered and accepted. $1B of ARR was already operating. EV is about 3.7x the contracted $4B. 5. In the June 2026 quarter, IREN's customers funded most of its capex. On our ABBX dashboard, customer prepayments and deferred revenue covered 87% of IREN's cash capex in that quarter ($1.72B of $1.98B). The same measure was 21% at NBIS and 12% at CRWV. Working-capital inflows covered 90% of IREN's capex and 36% of NBIS's. CRWV's working capital was an outflow equal to 8% of its capex. More than half of IREN's customer prepayments came under the $MSFT contract. At 30 Jun 2026, $1.01B of IREN's $1.84B of deferred revenue sat in the subsidiary that holds the GPUs for the MSFT contract, per its annual report. IREN said on 27 Aug that $3.6B of GPU financing plus customer prepayments fund about 96% of the GPU capex for the MSFT contract. IREN also said its recent contracts carry prepayments of 45–55% of GPU capex. So in that quarter customer cash, not new debt or shares, paid for most of IREN's capex. At NBIS and CRWV it paid for a small share. 6. Operations are the weak point. Some people are questioning the quality of the GPU cloud service IREN delivers to end customers. We share the concern, and it is not new to us. We recorded it in our 1Q26 rebalancing meeting and again in 2Q26 and 3Q26. One of our biggest concerns on IREN is that the CEO treats software as easy, low-value work next to power, land and data centres. That includes the orchestration software that schedules customers' jobs and manages the GPUs. We expected this to slow IREN's growth, not to threaten the business, for three reasons. (A) In our view the bottleneck in AI infrastructure today is powered capacity, not the know-how to run GPU fleets. IREN said on 27 Aug that its recent 3-year contracts price above $20M of revenue per MW of computing capacity. It estimates about a 2-year payback on the GPUs and related equipment. It also said its 2026 capacity is largely sold out. (B) Hyperscalers and other bulk buyers of IREN's capacity can manage and optimise GPUs better than IREN can. What they need from IREN is powered GPU data centres delivered on time. MSFT's $9.7B contract is for GB300 GPUs in four 50MW buildings. MSFT accepted the first, Horizon 1, in August 2026. IREN targets Horizons 2–4 in the December quarter. (C) $NVDA is partnering with IREN and is trying to make running large GPU fleets more standard and simpler. In our view NVDA wants standard fleet-management software so that more companies can run its GPUs well, which makes its chips easier to buy and use. On 7 May 2026 NVDA signed a five-year, $3.4B managed GPU cloud contract with IREN that uses Mirantis orchestration software. The same day it announced a partnership to deploy up to 5GW on NVDA's DSX reference designs. DSX is NVDA's standard set of designs and software for building and running AI data centres. In its 31 May 2026 DSX release, NVDA says the DSX OS software handles tasks such as keeping GPUs healthy, scheduling jobs and running several customers on one cluster. The same release names IREN, CRWV and NBIS among the cloud partners deploying core parts of DSX. The risk in (C) is that IREN's CEO may be too optimistic about how capable NVDA will be at this and how soon. 7. IREN is buying software and hiring managers to run its cloud better. It bought Mirantis, a cloud software company with more than 1,500 enterprise customers, on 4 Aug 2026. IREN said at completion that it paid about 12.6M shares plus about $40M. In July 2026 it hired a product chief from $ORCL (its cloud unit), a data-center development chief from $GOOGL and CyrusOne, and a security chief from $NTNX. We found no hire of a head of cloud operations. We would change our view in three cases. First, if a Horizon delivery for MSFT is missed or rejected. Second, if the Q1 FY27 report arrives with no new contract for 2027 capacity announced. Third, if IREN's weak end-user experience turns out to come from its infrastructure, meaning power, cooling, networking, storage or the GPU hardware itself, and not just from its orchestration software. The third matters because bulk buyers can replace IREN's software with their own, but they depend on IREN for the site and the hardware.

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