Oracle shares soared 13% on Thursday to a record close, after the database software vendor issued robust earnings and a strong forecast, fueled by growth in cloud.

Revenue climbed 11% year over year during the fiscal fourth quarter to $15.9 billion, topping the $15.59 billion average estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.70 exceeded the average analyst estimate of $1.64.

“All told, ORCL has entered an entirely new wave of enterprise popularity that it has not seen since the Internet era in the late 90s,” Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note to clients. The firm was one of several to lift its price target on the stock, raising its prediction to $190 from $130.

Oracle has been making headway in the cloud infrastructure market to challenge Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It’s still small by comparison, with $3 billion in cloud revenue during the May quarter, compared with over $12 billion for Google, which counts productivity software subscriptions and cloud infrastructure sales when reporting cloud metrics. But Oracle’s business is growing faster.

Future expansion can also come from sales of Oracle’s database on clouds other than its own.

“The growth rate in multi-cloud is astonishing,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said on Wednesday’s conference call with analysts. “In other words, our database is now moving very rapidly to the cloud, I think because – a few reasons, because the database has now all these AI capabilities, but also, quite frankly, now people can get it in whatever cloud they want.”

Remaining performance obligations, a measurement of money that’s expected to be recognized as revenue in the future, sat at $138 billion, up 41% from a year earlier. Oracle CEO Safra Catz said RPO will likely more than double in the 2026 fiscal year, which ends in May 2026. Revenue for the new fiscal year should come in above $67 billion, she said. That’s higher than LSEG’s $65.18 billion consensus.

Gains from OpenAI’s Stargate artificial intelligence data center project, targeting $500 billion in investments over four years, are not yet included in forecasts.

“If Stargate turns out to be, everything is advertised, then we’ve understated our RPO growth,” Ellison said.

For fiscal 2029, revenue should be above the $104 billion target the company set in September, Catz said.

Still, the company faces the challenge of meeting client demand in cloud.

“Demand continues to dramatically outstrip supply,” Catz said, though she added that the company isn’t having trouble sourcing Nvidia graphics processing units.

Analysts at RBC, who recommend holding the stock, raised their price target to $195 to $145. But they noted that, “with the backdrop of continued capacity constraints, we struggle to see a path to meaningful acceleration in the near term.”

WATCH: Oracle shares hit record high

Chime shares jumped 37% in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday after the provider of online banking services sold shares in an IPO that valued the company at $11.6 billion.

Late Wednesday, Chime raised about $700 million in its offering, and existing investors sold an additional $165 million worth of shares. The stock, trading under the ticker symbol CHYM, closed on Thursday at $37.11, up from its IPO price of $27. It’s market cap climbed to $13.5 billion.

Chime’s IPO, from a valuation perspective, represents a big step down from where venture investors like Sequoia Capital valued the company in its last fundraising round in 2021, when private tech markets were raging. The valuation at the time was $25 billion.

Still, Chime’s offering is the latest sign that the fintech IPO market is opening up after a multi-year freeze brought on by rising interest rates and valuation resets. Recent debuts from eToro and crypto company Circle have rekindled optimism in the sector, with both stocks seeing strong initial pops.

Chime reported $518.7 million in revenue for the most recent quarter, a 32% increase from a year earlier. Net income narrowed slightly to $12.9 million, down from $15.9 million in the same period last year.

CEO Chris Britt said Chime has built a loyal user base by serving Americans earning $100,000 a year or less, a group often overlooked by traditional banks.

“Two-thirds of our customer base use us as their direct deposit account and primary account relationship,” Britt told CNBC’s David Faber. “We help our members avoid fees, get access to short-term liquidity, build their credit and build their savings — and it’s that combination of services that really resonates and matters most to the everyday consumer.”

Britt said the company reached $25 million in adjusted profitability in the first quarter and has improved its adjusted profit margin by 40 points over the past two years.

The company’s top institutional shareholders are DST Global and Crosslink Capital. Iconiq was one of the firms that invested six years ago, when Chime raised money at a $1.5 billion valuation.

“We first invested in Chime in 2019 and continued to invest through subsequent rounds because of their singular, unwavering focus on serving everyday Americans — and the trust they’ve built with that core customer base,” Yoonkee Sull, general partner at Iconiq, said in an interview.

The average Chime customer completes more than 55 transactions per month using the Chime card and interacts with the app four to five times a day. Active member growth rose 23% in the first quarter from a year earlier, Britt said, with 8.6 million monthly active users and an increasing number turning to Chime to serve as their primary banking relationship.

Customer acquisition doesn’t come cheap. Chime disclosed in its prospectus that it spent $1.4 billion on marketing between 2022 and 2024. Britt said the retention rate is above 90% once users set up direct deposit.

“Sometimes for people, it takes a change in life — a change in their career, a job change — to be the point in time when they actually make the switch and use us as a primary bank account,” he said.

The company’s core revenue comes from interchange fees, the charges merchants pay when consumers swipe Chime-issued debit or credit cards. Britt said 72% of Chime’s revenue is payments driven, versus traditional banks that rely heavily on fees from overdrafts and minimum balances.

“It’s pretty simplistic,” said Dan Dolev, an analyst at Mizuho. “I’m actually surprised by how unsophisticated that business model is.”

Chime’s performance in the public markets may set the tone for what comes next. Several other fintech players, including Klarna, Gemini and Bullish, have already filed for IPOs publicly or confidentially.

“If it goes well — and you’ll know that in the next two to three months — I think you’ll see much more receptivity” from other companies in the pipeline, said David Golden, partner at Revolution Ventures and former head of tech investment banking at JPMorgan Chase.

“If it doesn’t go well,” Golden added, “I think they’ll continue just to sit on their hands and wait it out.”

Chime is a five-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, having made the annual list from 2020-2024.

WATCH: What happens now that the IPO window is open

Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday unveiled new details about its next-generation AI chips, the Instinct MI400 series, that will ship next year.

The MI400 chips will be able to be assembled into a full server rack called Helios, AMD said, which will enable thousands of the chips to be tied together in a way that they can be used as one “rack-scale” system.

“For the first time, we architected every part of the rack as a unified system,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said at a launch event in San Jose, California, on Thursday.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on stage on with Su and said his company would use the AMD chips.

“When you first started telling me about the specs, I was like, there’s no way, that just sounds totally crazy,” Altman said. “It’s gonna be an amazing thing.”

AMD’s rack-scale setup will make the chips look to a user like one system, which is important for most artificial intelligence customers like cloud providers and companies that develop large language models. Those customers want “hyperscale” clusters of AI computers that can span entire data centers and use massive amounts of power.

“Think of Helios as really a rack that functions like a single, massive compute engine,” said Su, comparing it against Nvidia’s Vera Rubin racks, which are expected to be released next year.

AMD’s rack-scale technology also enables its latest chips to compete with Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which already come in configurations with 72 graphics-processing units stitched together. Nvidia is AMD’s primary and only rival in big data center GPUs for developing and deploying AI applications.

OpenAI — a notable Nvidia customer — has been giving AMD feedback on its MI400 roadmap, the chip company said. With the MI400 chips and this year’s MI355X chips, AMD is planning to compete against rival Nvidia on price, with a company executive telling reporters on Wednesday that the chips will cost less to operate thanks to lower power consumption, and that AMD is undercutting Nvidia with “aggressive” prices.

So far, Nvidia has dominated the market for data center GPUs, partially because it was the first company to develop the kind of software needed for AI developers to take advantage of chips originally designed to display graphics for 3D games. Over the past decade, before the AI boom, AMD focused on competing against Intel in server CPUs.

Su said that AMD’s MI355X can outperform Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, despite Nvidia using its “proprietary” CUDA software.

“It says that we have really strong hardware, which we always knew, but it also shows that the open software frameworks have made tremendous progress,” Su said.

AMD shares are flat so far in 2025, signaling that Wall Street doesn’t yet see it as a major threat to Nvidia’s dominance.

Andrew Dieckmann, AMD’s general manger for data center GPUs, said Wednesday that AMD’s AI chips would cost less to operate and less to acquire.

“Across the board, there is a meaningful cost of acquisition delta that we then layer on our performance competitive advantage on top of, so significant double-digit percentage savings,” Dieckmann said.

Over the next few years, big cloud companies and countries alike are poised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build new data center clusters around GPUs in order to accelerate the development of cutting-edge AI models. That includes $300 billion this year alone in planned capital expenditures from megacap technology companies.

AMD is expecting the total market for AI chips to exceed $500 billion by 2028, although it hasn’t said how much of that market it can claim — Nvidia has over 90% of the market currently, according to analyst estimates.

Both companies have committed to releasing new AI chips on an annual basis, as opposed to a biannual basis, emphasizing how fierce competition has become and how important bleeding-edge AI chip technology is for companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon.

AMD has bought or invested in 25 AI companies in the past year, Su said, including the purchase of ZT Systems earlier this year, a server maker that developed the technology AMD needed to build its rack-sized systems.

“These AI systems are getting super complicated, and full-stack solutions are really critical,” Su said.

AMD said that its Instinct chips have been adopted by seven of the 10 largest AI customers, including OpenAI, Tesla, xAI, and Cohere.

Oracle plans to offer clusters with over 131,000 MI355X chips to its customers, AMD said.

Officials from Meta said Thursday that they were using clusters of AMD’s CPUs and GPUs to run inference for its Llama model, and that it plans to buy AMD’s next-generation servers.

A Microsoft representative said that it uses AMD chips to serve its Copilot AI features.

AMD declined to say how much its chips cost — it doesn’t sell chips by themselves, and end-users usually buy them through a hardware company like Dell or Super Micro Computer — but the company is planning for the MI400 chips to compete on price.

The Santa Clara company is pairing its GPUs alongside its CPUs and networking chips from its 2022 acquisition of Pensando to build its Helios racks. That means greater adoption of its AI chips should also benefit the rest of AMD’s business. It’s also using an open-source networking technology to closely integrate its rack systems, called UALink, versus Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink.

AMD claims its MI355X can deliver 40% more tokens — a measure of AI output — per dollar than Nvidia’s chips because its chips use less power than its rival’s.

Data center GPUs can cost tens of thousands of dollars per chip, and cloud companies usually buy them in large quantities.

AMD’s AI chip business is still much smaller than Nvidia’s. It said it had $5 billion in AI sales in its fiscal 2024, but JP Morgan analysts are expecting 60% growth in the category this year.

WATCH: AMD CEO Lisa Su: Chip export controls are a headwind but we still see growth opportunity