meganwoolsey Home
Related Articles
The U.S. economy has a history of producing the world’s most valuable companies. United States Steel became the first-ever $1 billion company in 1901, and 117 years later, Apple became the first company in the world to surpass a $1 trillion valuation.
Apple is now worth over $3 trillion, but since 2018, tech giants Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Alphabet have joined it in the trillion-dollar club. But I think yet another is on track to join them.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) was founded in 1977 and has since participated in nearly every technological revolution. Right now, it’s quickly becoming a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) data center infrastructure, which could be the company’s ticket to a $1 trillion valuation.
Based on Oracle’s current market cap of $429 billion, investors who buy its stock today could earn a gain of 133% if it gets there.
A leader in AI infrastructure
Large language models (LLMs) are at the foundation of every AI software application. They are trained by ingesting mountains of data, and from there, the model identifies patterns and learns to make predictions. Typically, the “smartest” AI applications are powered by the LLMs with the most data, and the training process is facilitated by centralized data centers filled with graphics processing units (GPUs).
Nvidia supplies the world’s most powerful GPUs for developing AI models. Simply put, the more GPUs a developer can access, the more data they can feed into an LLM, and the faster it can be processed. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Supercluster technology allows developers to scale up to more than 32,000 Nvidia GPUs (and soon, over 65,000), which is more than any other data center provider.
Plus, the company’s random direct memory access (RDMA) networking technology moves data from one point to another more quickly than traditional Ethernet networks. Since developers often pay for computing capacity by the minute, OCI is among the fastest and cheapest solutions for training LLMs. That’s why AI leaders like OpenAI, Cohere, and Elon Musk’s xAI are now using Oracle.
Oracle chairman Larry Ellison says the company currently has 85 live data centers, with 77 under construction. However, he estimates the company will eventually have somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000, so it has barely scratched the surface of its opportunity so far.
Automation is one thing that sets Oracle apart from other data center operators. No matter its size, every Oracle data center is identical in terms of functionality, so the company is able to manage them all with software alone — no humans required. Not only is that a big cost savings for the end-user, but it also creates a more secure service by eliminating human error. Plus, automation is the key to scaling up Oracle’s data center locations into the thousands.
Oracle’s data center revenue is surging
Oracle generated $13.3 billion in total revenue during the fiscal 2025 first quarter (ended Aug. 31), a 7% increase from the year-ago period. The OCI segment, specifically, delivered $2.2 billion in revenue, up by a whopping 46%.
As in previous quarters, OCI revenue would have grown even faster during Q1 if the company had more data centers online. It currently has an enormous backlog of customers waiting for more computing capacity.
That is reflected in Oracle’s remaining performance obligations, which came in at a record $99 billion during the quarter, up 52% year over year. That was an acceleration from the 44% growth the company achieved in the final quarter of fiscal 2024. Oracle signed 42 new deals for GPU capacity worth $3 billion during Q1 alone, contributing to the sharp increase in remaining performance obligations (RPOs).
CEO Safra Catz believes 38% of the company’s RPOs (around $37.6 billion) will be converted to revenue over the next 12 months, which should help the company return to double-digit percentage growth at the top line. Additionally, she expects an acceleration in OCI growth compared to the previous fiscal year.
Oracle’s (mathematical) path to the $1 trillion club
Oracle has generated $3.88 in trailing-12-month earnings per share. So, based on its current stock price of $155.89, it trades at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 40.2. The Nasdaq-100 technology index trades at a P/E ratio of 30.7, so Oracle stock certainly isn’t cheap when measured against its peers.
However, Oracle’s trailing-12-month earnings grew by 15% compared to the prior period, and Wall Street is forecasting accelerated earnings growth of 24% for fiscal 2025 overall. That might explain why investors are now willing to pay a premium for its stock.
Mathematically speaking, if Oracle’s P/E ratio remains constant, the company could achieve a $1 trillion valuation within the next 10 years, even if its earnings growth slows to just 8.8%. But that’s a very conservative estimate considering based on Ellison’s comments, it could grow its data center footprint tenfold over the long term. If that happens, Oracle’s earnings growth is likely to accelerate, not decelerate, in the coming decade.
Remember, the company’s data centers rely on automation, so they offer incredible scalability. In other words, Oracle should experience an expanding gross profit margin as more data centers are built, which will be a huge tailwind for its earnings.
As a result, I think Oracle has a great opportunity to join its big-tech peers in the $1 trillion club within the next decade.
Should you invest $1,000 in Oracle right now?
Before you buy stock in Oracle, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Oracle wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $729,857!*
Stock Advisor provides investors with an easy-to-follow blueprint for success, including guidance on building a portfolio, regular updates from analysts, and two new stock picks each month. The Stock Advisor service has more than quadrupled the return of S&P 500 since 2002*.
*Stock Advisor returns as of September 9, 2024
John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Anthony Di Pizio has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
1 Unstoppable Stock That Could Join Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta in the $1 Trillion Club was originally published by The Motley Fool
Source link
