Oracle

Oracle is the enterprise-database and applications giant that has re-emerged as a major AI cloud through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It has signed enormous compute contracts — including a central role in the OpenAI-anchored Stargate program — and its reported AI-driven backlog transformed market perceptions of the company. OCI's high-performance GPU networking has made it a preferred venue for large-scale training.

Founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates, Oracle built its fortune on the enterprise relational database and later on business applications. It entered cloud infrastructure late but designed OCI specifically for performance-sensitive workloads, with GPU cluster networking that appealed to AI labs.

OCI's differentiator is bare-metal GPU superclusters with high-bandwidth RDMA networking, hosting training for customers including major AI labs. Oracle also embeds generative AI across its Fusion applications and databases, and partners with Cohere and others for enterprise model deployment.

Oracle's AI inflection came through massive contracted capacity: it is a lead partner in Stargate alongside OpenAI, SoftBank, and MGX, and disclosed a remaining-performance-obligation backlog that reset expectations for the company's growth. That backlog also concentrated risk on a handful of large AI customers, a dynamic closely watched by investors.