Oracle has reported a three per cent growth in the fourth quarter year-over-year, elevating revenues to £10.8 billion.
The results also highlighted that cloud revenue (IaaS and SaaS) surged by 20 per cent to £4 billion, driven by a 42 per cent increase in cloud infrastructure (IaaS) revenue.
For the entire fiscal year 2024, Oracle’s total revenue climbed by six per cent to £40 billion, with cloud services and licence support revenue growing by **twelve per cent** to £29.8 billion.
The company attributed this growth to a demand for training large AI language models on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, said the company secured the most significant sales contracts during the third and fourth quarters, spurred by this AI demand. Consequently, Oracle’s remaining performance obligations (RPO) soared by 44 per cent to £74 billion.
Catz is optimistic about the robust AI demand, predicting double-digit revenue growth for the fiscal year 2025. She expects each successive quarter to outpace the last as OCI capacity aligns with demand.
In 2023, CTO Larry Ellison described genAI as a “boon”, asserting it would significantly benefit Oracle, a forecast that seems to be coming to fruition.
He said, “You can’t construct any of these AI models without a vast amount of training data. What generative AI has demonstrated is that the major challenge in training one of these models is simply ingesting this immense volume of data into your GPU supercluster. It’s a colossal data challenge, given the sheer quantity of data required.”
Ellison added, “We believe it’s a boon to our business. We are now venturing into the deep waters of the information age. The demands on data are intensifying and becoming increasingly critical.”
Oracle also unveiled major advancements in its multi-cloud strategy. Its collaboration with Microsoft has grown, with both companies agreeing to join forces to support OpenAI and ChatGPT.
Moreover, 11 of the 23 OCI data centres being established within Azure became operational during the fourth quarter.
Additionally, Oracle has inked a deal with Google to link their clouds. Initially, 12 OCI data centres will be constructed inside the Google Cloud, with the Oracle database anticipated to be accessible within the Google Cloud in September.
