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Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and technology chief, speaks at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on September 16, 2019.

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Oracle is having a moment.

For years, the database software developer lagged behind tech rivals in building cloud technology that met the demands of the modern-day enterprise. But that’s changing, and Wall Street is quite pleased with what it sees from Larry Ellison’s 46-year-old company.

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Oracle shares climbed 4.8% on Wednesday to $122.24, closing at a record for a fifth straight day and the eighth time this month. The stock is up 73% over the past 12 months, outperforming all large-cap enterprise tech stocks over that stretch other than Nvidia. The shares are up over 50% in 2023, which would mark the best year for shareholders since the dot-com boom of 1999.

The company got its latest boost this week after reporting stronger-than-expected earnings and revenue, prompting nods of approval from analysts. Goldman Sachs upgraded its rating on the stock to the equivalent of hold from sell.

Within hours of the earnings report, Bloomberg declared that Ellison had reached the No. 4 spot on its ranking of billionaires, his highest spot to date. He surpassed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

“Let’s give him credit where it’s finally due,” said Eric Lynch, managing director of Scharf Investments, which held $163 million worth of Oracle shares at the end of the first quarter, according to regulatory filings. “The upside case is finally coming through.”

The story that’s exciting investors these days? No surprise. It’s about artificial intelligence.

Prior to the latest rally, Oracle was largely viewed as a technology has-been rather than as an innovator. In the red-hot cloud market, it had lost market share to Salesforce in selling software to sales reps, and was a bit player in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where Amazon, Microsoft and Google were leading the way. Oracle picked up significant business from TikTok and Zoom, but big names were mostly going elsewhere.

Now, Oracle is seeing accelerated growth thanks to the craze around generative AI, the technology that can craft images or text from a few words of human input. The company is a significant investor in Cohere, an enterprise-focused generative AI startup whose technology can power copywriting, search and summarization. 

Cohere is valued at over $2 billion and ranked No. 44 on CNBC’s 2023 Disruptor 50 List.

On the earnings call, Ellison told analysts that customers have “recently signed contracts to purchase more than $2 billion of capacity” on what Oracle calls its Gen 2 Cloud.

After its market cap fell below that of the younger Salesforce in 2020, Oracle reclaimed the lead over its longtime rival the following year, and now it’s not even close. Oracle is worth $330 billion as of Wednesday’s close, while Salesforce’s market cap sits at $204 billion.

Oracle is even growing faster, with revenue in the latest quarter increasing 17% from the prior year, compared to 11% growth at Salesforce.

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Cloud infrastructure revenue at Oracle surged 76% from a year earlier, surpassing growth of 55% the prior quarter. That’s one data point that analyst Kash Rangan and his Goldman Sachs colleagues highlighted in their upgrade.

The analysts said the acceleration is “a clear signal that Oracle’s advertised price/performance advantage vs. the hyperscalers is resonating with the market (both net new and existing customers), which should position the company for durable share gains despite its late entry into IaaS.”

Even with the cloud infrastructure growth, Oracle management called for no change to capital expenditures in the new 2024 fiscal year, which bodes well for free cash flow generation, the Goldman analysts said.

Like several enterprise-focused technology companies, Oracle started selling cloud-based versions of applications that clients had previously run in their on-premises data centers. The company expanded its reach with the $9.1 billion acquisition of NetSuite in 2016.

Rebuilding the guts of the data center was less straightforward, and Oracle quickly fell behind. In 2009, Ellison dismissed the rise of cloud-computing branding.

“Our industry is so bizarre,” he said. “You know, they just change a term, and they think they’ve invented technology.”

Ellison made a bad bet. Between 2010 and the end of 2020, not only did Oracle’s stock badly underperform Amazon, Microsoft and Google, but just buying an S&P 500 tracking index would have returned almost double what an investor would’ve have made on Oracle.

Oracle eventually came around to charging organizations for servers, storage and networking services based on how much they used, following in the path of the market leaders.

The company introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud in 2015, nine years after the launch of Amazon Web Services’ foundational EC2 computing service. Then, in 2018, Oracle debuted its Gen 2 cloud portfolio.

In October Ellison said he thought Oracle had been copying rivals, so he canceled the existing cloud effort and pushed for a new approach. As organizations look for ways to reduce IT spending, Ellison on Monday told analysts that Oracle’s cloud database can be faster and cheaper than what’s available from AWS.

Lynch, whose Los Gatos, California-based investment firm took a stake in Oracle in 2011, recalled that people used to poke fun of Ellison for his earnings call routine of reciting the names of small-time operations that had signed up for Oracle’s cloud services. The company was still appealing to value-oriented investors because it had a strong balance sheet due to a huge roster of legacy clients, and boasted stronger profit margins than many of its peers.

Now Ellison can reel off big brands using his company’s cloud. Oracle called out Dollar Tree, Exxon Mobil, and Pfizer as cloud customers during its fiscal fourth quarter.

Lynch acknowledged that Oracle appears to be enjoying its position within the AI gold rush and said he doesn’t expect such high growth in cloud infrastructure to persist.

For the time being, Ellison can enjoy his company’s bragging rights in Silicon Valley at a time when so many high-profile and once high-flying neighbors are downsizing for the first time in their history. Oracle has had some layoffs but a smaller number.

On Oracle’s earnings call this week, CEO Safra Catz took a minute to express gratitude to the company’s customers and employees.

“Some of you are new, and many of you have been with us for years, in fact, even decades, and I think you all see that our best days are in fact ahead of us,” she said. Catz then thanked Ellison “for leading with brilliance, determination and vision and allowing us to all be part of this incredible journey, which is just getting started.”

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Oracle 'multiple years late' in A.I. race despite post-earnings surge, says Jefferies' Brent Thill

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Nvidia CEO downplays U.S. fears that China’s military will use his firm’s chips

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Nvidia CEO downplays U.S. fears that China's military will use his firm's chips

Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has downplayed U.S. fears that his firm’s chips will aid the Chinese military, days ahead of another trip to the country as he attempts to walk a tightrope between Washington and Beijing. 

In an interview with CNN aired Sunday, Huang said “we don’t have to worry about” China’s military using U.S.-made technology because “they simply can’t rely on it.”

“It could be limited at any time; not to mention, there’s plenty of computing capacity in China already,” Huang said. “They don’t need Nvidia’s chips, certainly, or American tech stacks in order to build their military,” he added.

The comments were made in reference to years of bipartisan U.S. policy that placed restrictions on semiconductor companies, prohibiting them from selling their most advanced artificial intelligence chips to clients in China. 

Huang also repeated past criticisms of the policies, arguing that the tactic of export controls has been counterproductive to the ultimate goal of U.S. tech leadership. 

“We want the American tech stack to be the global standard … in order for us to do that, we have to be in search of all the AI developers in the world,” Huang said, adding that half of the world’s AI developers are in China. 

‘The Nvidia Way’ author Tae Kim: Jensen Huang always positions Nvidia ahead of the next big trend

That means for America to be an AI leader, U.S. technology has to be available to all markets, including China, he added.

Washington’s latest restrictions on Nvidia’s sales to China were implemented in April and are expected to result in billions in losses for the company. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang’s CNN interview came just days before he travels to China for his second trip to the country this year, and as Nvidia is reportedly working on another chip that is compliant with the latest export controls.

Last week, the Nvidia CEO met with U.S. President Donald Trump, and was warned by U.S. lawmakers not to meet with companies connected to China’s military or intelligence bodies, or entities named on America’s restricted export list.

According to Daniel Newman, CEO of tech advisory firm The Futurum Group, Huang’s CNN interview exemplifies how Huang has been threading a needle between Washington and Beijing as it tries to maintain maximum market access.

“He needs to walk a proverbial tightrope to make sure that he doesn’t rattle the Trump administration,” Newman said, adding that he also wants to be in a position for China to invest in Nvidia technology if and when the policy provides a better climate to do so.

But that’s not to say that his downplaying of Washington’s concerns is valid, according to Newman. “I think it’s hard to completely accept the idea that China couldn’t use Nvidia’s most advanced technologies for military use.”

He added that he would expect Nvidia’s technology to be at the core of any country’s AI training, including for use in the development of advanced weaponry. 

A U.S. official told Reuters last month that China’s large language model startup DeepSeek — which says it used Nvidia chips to train its models — was supporting China’s military and intelligence operations. 

On Sunday, Huang acknowledged there were concerns about DeepSeek’s open-source R1 reasoning model being trained in China but said that there was no evidence that it presents dangers for that reason alone.

Huang complimented the R1 reasoning model, calling it “revolutionary,” and said its open-source nature has empowered startup companies, new industries, and countries to be able to engage in AI. 

“The fact of the matter is, [China and the U.S.] are competitors, but we are highly interdependent, and to the extent that we can compete and both aspire to win, it is fine to respect our competitors,” he concluded. 

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup. 

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

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Google pushes "AI Mode" on homepage

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than  million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

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The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.

On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.

Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.

Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.

WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports

Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports

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