Oracle’s stock is finally catching up with its talk about cloud, fueled by surging infrastructure and AI demand. In its recent Q4 2025 earnings statement, the 46-year-old database giant surprised Wall Street with an 11% jump in revenue (to $15.9 billion) and bullish forecasts for the year ahead. Oracle’s stock promptly enjoyed its best week since 2001, leaping 24%. It’s relatively easy to please (and fool) investors, but there’s real substance in that 11% jump, and that substance is, at its foundation, all about data.
This is new for Oracle. I and others have criticized the company for being too slow to embrace cloud. As a result, both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services pulled ahead of Oracle in database revenue a few years back as cloud became central to enterprise strategy.
Oracle, however, found a workaround.
For decades, Oracle Database has been the heart of the enterprise. It’s the system of record for much of the world’s most critical data. Instead of competing head-on with the likes of OpenAI and Google on foundation models, Oracle is offering something far more practical to its enterprise customers: the ability to run AI securely on their own data, within their own cloud environment. The new Oracle Database 23ai is a testament to this strategy, integrating AI capabilities directly into the database so that companies can get insights from their data without having to ship it off to a third-party service.
It’s smart, but it’s also not enough. Sustaining Oracle’s newfound momentum may require Oracle to succeed in an area where it has historically struggled: winning over developers. Developers, after all, are the people building the applications that will draw on all that Oracle data.
Cloud-based AI favors database vendors
Large language models (LLMs) have wowed us for the past few years with all they could do with massive quantities of publicly available data (even if the unwitting data providers, like Reddit, haven’t always been happy about that role). They’ve started to stumble, however, en route to true enterprise adoption, hampered by security concerns and the reality that as informed as they are by the internet, they’re incredibly dumb when it comes to a given enterprise because they have zero access to that data. Companies have tried to get around this problem with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other tactics, but the real bonanza is waiting for the companies that can help enterprises apply AI to their data without having that data leave their secured infrastructure, whether running on premises or in the cloud.
A few vendors are figuring it out. Indeed, I’ve had a front-row seat to this phenomenon at MongoDB, where companies are finding it useful to store and search vector embeddings alongside operational data. Oracle is apparently discovering something similar, as noted on its earnings call, and is finally spending big on data centers to keep up with rising demand ($21 billion this year, which is more than 10 times what it was just four years ago).
Unsurprisingly, Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison couldn’t resist a bit of grandstanding on the earnings call, effectively arguing that when it comes to enterprise AI, Oracle has a home-field advantage. “These other companies say they have all the data, so they can do AI really well…. The only problem with that statement is they don’t have all the data. We do. We have most of the world’s valuable data. The vast majority of it is in an Oracle database.” It’s classic Ellison swagger, but there’s truth there: Oracle databases remain ubiquitous in large enterprises, storing troves of business-critical data.
Oracle is leveraging that position by making its database and cloud services “AI-centric.” Oracle’s pitch is that enterprises can use the data already sitting in their Oracle apps and databases to gain AI-driven insights securely and reliably without having to migrate everything to some new (and likely less secure) AI platform. “We are the key enabler for enterprises to use their own data and AI models,” Ellison argues. “No one else is doing that…. This is why our database business is going to grow dramatically.”
In Oracle’s view, the real gold rush in enterprise AI isn’t just hyping up the largest general AI models, but helping companies apply AI to their own data. Oracle has also been a bit less Oracle-like by embracing multicloud. Rather than insisting all workloads run on Oracle’s cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI), the company has inked partnerships to make Oracle Database available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For enterprises concerned about data sovereignty, latency, or just avoiding single-vendor lock-in, that’s an attractive story.
But it’s not yet a complete story. For that, Oracle needs to figure out developers.
The missing piece
Eleven years ago I called out the missing piece in Oracle’s cloud ambitions: “Oracle … has built a cloud for its existing customers but not for developers who are building big data, internet of things, mobile, and other modern applications.” I doubled down on this theme, insisting that Oracle had failed to remedy “an almost complete lack of interest from developers.”
Plus ça change…
Oracle’s cloud growth so far has come largely from selling to the CIO, not the developer, signing big deals with companies that already trust Oracle for databases or apps, helping customers migrate existing Oracle-centric workloads, etc. That’s a perfectly valid strategy (and a lucrative one), but it leaves Oracle underexposed to the grassroots innovation happening in the broader developer community. Why does developer enthusiasm matter if Oracle can keep signing enterprise contracts? Because in the cloud era, developers are often the new enterprise kingmakers driving technology adoption.
Sure, the CIO of a large bank might sign a top-down deal with Oracle for an ERP system or database licenses, but it’s the developers and data scientists who are dreaming up the next generation of applications—the ones that don’t even exist yet. They have a world of cloud options at their fingertips. If they aren’t thinking of Oracle as a platform to create on, Oracle risks missing out on new workloads that aren’t already tied to its legacy footprint.
A modest proposal
It’s not my job to tell Oracle how to get its developer act together, but there are some obvious (if difficult) things it can and should do. Oracle doesn’t need to become “cool” in a Silicon Valley startup sense, but it does need to lower barriers so that a curious engineer or a small team can readily choose Oracle (including MySQL) for their next project. For example, years ago Oracle ceded MySQL’s dominant open source pole position to Postgres. It’s unclear whether the company would ever consider an open governance model for MySQL, but that may be the only way to put MySQL on equal footing. MySQL has great engineering, but it needs community.
Less culturally difficult, Oracle needs to keep improving onboarding and pricing to make it easy for developers to pick its cloud. One thing that made AWS popular with developers was the ability to swipe a credit card and get going immediately, with transparent usage-based pricing. Oracle has made progress here. OCI has a free tier and straightforward pricing for many services, but it can go further. For example, offering generous free credits for startups, individual developer accounts, or open-source projects could also seed grassroots adoption.
Oracle should also take a cue from Microsoft and increase its presence in developer communities and conferences, highlight success stories of “built on OCI” startups, and expand programs that engage developers directly. Oracle has started moving in this direction. At its CloudWorld 2024 conference, Oracle unveiled Oracle Code Assist (an AI-powered programming assistant for Java developers on OCI) and new features in its Oracle Kubernetes Engine to better support cloud-native apps and AI workloads. These are welcome additions. The key is to get such tools into developers’ hands and iterate based on feedback, which could be accomplished by an emboldened developer advocacy team.
Finally, Oracle should package its unique strengths in a way that allows developers to easily tap into them. For instance, Oracle’s expertise in databases and data management could be offered as developer-friendly services. The company’s new Oracle Database 23c has “AI” features (JSON relational duality, vector search, etc.) that sound great, but Oracle needs to ensure a developer can quickly provision a development instance of this database, load some data, and call an API or driver to start building an AI-powered app. In short, Oracle should make its cool tech easily accessible. If Oracle can give developers a taste of what its high-performance cloud and data systems can do—without a months-long enterprise procurement cycle—some will inevitably be impressed and advocate using Oracle for new projects.
Oracle is achieving something rare: a true second act in tech, decades into its life. By leaning into what it does best (databases, enterprise applications, and now high-performance cloud infrastructure) Oracle has made itself a contender in the age of AI. The next test will be whether the company can broaden its influence beyond the traditional enterprise IT shops that have always been its stronghold. If Oracle can find a way to engage developers on their own terms (without diluting its enterprise savvy), it could unlock another level of growth that makes today’s resurgence look modest.