AUSTIN, Texas — Oracle posted fiscal third-quarter results that beat Wall Street expectations and lifted its fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to $90 billion Tuesday, March 10. The stronger view reflected demand for artificial intelligence training and inference workloads that kept pushing Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business higher, expanded contracted backlog and gave investors a stronger answer to concerns about the payoff from the company’s data center spending.
As detailed in Oracle’s fiscal third-quarter earnings release, revenue rose 22% to $17.2 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share climbed 21% to $1.79, while total cloud revenue increased 44% to $8.9 billion. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, jumped 84% to $4.9 billion, and remaining performance obligations reached $553 billion, up 325% from a year earlier. Oracle said it was the first quarter in more than 15 years in which organic total revenue and non-GAAP earnings per share both grew at least 20%.
That performance topped the market’s bar. In a Reuters report on the results and market reaction, analysts cited by LSEG had expected fiscal 2027 revenue of about $86.6 billion and third-quarter remaining performance obligations of roughly $540.4 billion, while Oracle shares rose 8.3% in extended trading after the release. Oracle also said most of the quarter’s jump in future contracted revenue came from large-scale AI deals where customers are either prepaying for equipment or supplying GPUs, limiting the need for additional Oracle funding.
Oracle kept its fiscal 2026 revenue target at $67 billion and its capital expenditure plan at $50 billion, while projecting fourth-quarter revenue growth of 19% to 21% and total cloud revenue growth of 46% to 50%, according to the company’s March 10 8-K filing and the investor webcast and presentation page. Those figures suggest management sees the current AI demand wave extending beyond a single quarter.
Oracle earnings show AI cloud demand is still ahead of supply
The quarter matters because it gives Oracle a firmer response to the question that has shadowed the stock since late 2025: whether aggressive AI infrastructure spending would translate into profitable growth fast enough. On the earnings call, Oracle executives argued that cloud margins should improve over time as high-margin database services and other software workloads expand alongside raw AI compute demand.
Oracle earnings and the longer growth arc
The latest quarter also fits a pattern Oracle has been sketching for several earnings cycles. As Reuters reported in June 2024, Oracle was already forecasting double-digit fiscal 2025 revenue growth on strong AI demand, with CEO Safra Catz saying “each successive quarter should grow faster than the previous quarter” as OCI capacity caught up with demand.
By March 2025, Reuters reported that Oracle was projecting 15% revenue growth for fiscal 2026 and 20% for fiscal 2027, while Chairman Larry Ellison said the company was “on schedule to double” data center capacity and that customer demand was at record levels. That makes Tuesday’s $90 billion fiscal 2027 target look less like a sudden leap and more like the latest step in a growth case Oracle has been building for months.
Even so, the path has not been one-way optimism. In December 2025, Reuters reported that Oracle’s weaker-than-expected guidance and a $15 billion increase in planned capital spending had reignited investor concern that the AI build-out was racing ahead of profits. Tuesday’s report does not erase that risk, but it gives Oracle a stronger case that bookings, revenue growth and customer funding structures are beginning to catch up with the scale of its ambitions.
If Oracle can sustain OCI growth anywhere near current levels while converting its massive contracted backlog into recognized revenue, the company’s cloud business could begin to look less like a fast-growing challenger and more like a durable third force in enterprise AI infrastructure. For now, Oracle earnings suggest demand remains strong enough to keep that argument alive — and strong enough for management to attach a much larger number to fiscal 2027.
