Oracle has reported another major increase in its cloud business as demand for artificial intelligence computing continues to grow. The company’s remaining performance obligations, which represent contracted revenue expected in the future, increased by about $26 billion from the previous quarter to reach $664 billion.
A large part of the growth is being driven by demand for Oracle’s AI cloud infrastructure. During its first fiscal quarter, the company booked more than $30 billion in additional AI cloud contracts as businesses continue to look for powerful computing systems to train and run artificial intelligence models.
Oracle said demand for AI cloud training and inference services is still growing faster than available supply. This has pushed the company to expand its data center capacity and add more computing hardware for customers.
The company has also delivered more than 300,000 GPUs to AI cloud customers since the end of the previous quarter. The amount of computing capacity delivered was almost three times higher than in the previous quarter.
Oracle’s wider cloud business also recorded strong growth. Total cloud revenue increased 62% year over year to $11.6 billion. Revenue from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or IaaS, jumped 121% to $7.4 billion.
Overall quarterly revenue reached $19.3 billion, an increase of 30% compared with the same period a year earlier. The results show how quickly AI infrastructure is becoming an important part of Oracle’s business.
Building AI data centers requires large investments in GPUs, servers, power and other infrastructure. However, some of Oracle’s large AI contracts include customer prepayments or equipment supplied directly by customers. This can reduce the amount of money Oracle needs to spend itself when expanding capacity.
Oracle is continuing to invest heavily in its cloud infrastructure as it competes for growing AI workloads. Strong demand from companies developing and operating AI systems could help Oracle expand its position in the cloud computing market as the global race for AI infrastructure continues.
