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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.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

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.”

WATCH: Oracle ‘multiple years late’ in A.I. race despite post-earnings surge, says Jefferies’ Brent Thill

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

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Joby Aviation says it is doubling production at its air taxi manufacturing hub

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Joby Aviation says it is doubling production at its air taxi manufacturing hub

JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, stands near an electric air taxi by Joby Aviation at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.

Roselle Chen | Reuters

Joby Aviation is ramping up its manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. as it races to roll out air taxi service in 2026.

The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) maker said Tuesday that it’s launching production at its remodeled components facility in Dayton, Ohio, and plans to double capacity at its Marina, California, manufacturing hub.

“Reimagining urban mobility takes speed, scale, and precision manufacturing. Our expanded manufacturing footprint in both California and Ohio is preparing us to do just that,” said product chief Eric Allison in a release.

Shares jumped more than 7%, building on a 16% year-to-date gain.

Joby Aviation and competitors such as Archer Aviation and Eve Air Mobility are aiming to roll out eVTOLs worldwide that can ease traffic congestion in crowded city centers, but they are awaiting regulatory approval.

The company is currently in the process of gaining Federal Aviation Administration approval for its vehicles.

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Last month, Joby Aviation shares popped on news that it delivered its first eVTOL to the United Arab Emirates, with plans to launch service in the region next year. The company agreed to an exclusive six-year deal to roll out air taxi service in Dubai last February.

Joby said the new facilities will create hundreds of new full-time jobs and underscore its commitment to fostering American innovation. At full capacity, the 435,500-square-foot California factory will manufacture as many as 24 aircraft annually.

The electric air transport company also said the opening coincided with the flight of its sixth aircraft.

Engineers from Toyota will help ramp up aircraft production to 500 annually at the Ohio facility. The companies inked a $500 million deal last year.

Shares of Joby and its competitors have ballooned in value this year as interest in the technology gains steam.

In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included the creation of an air taxi testing program.

WATCH: Joby Aviation CEO on UAE delivery: This is a huge milestone for us

Joby Aviation CEO on UAE delivery: This is a huge milestone for us

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Commerce Secretary Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip

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Commerce Secretary Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip

Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy And Innovation Summit 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said the Trump administration reversed course on allowing Nvidia to sell its AI chips to China because the U.S. company will not be giving over its best technology.

Lutnick made the remark speaking with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, saying that Nvidia wants to sell China its “4th best” chip, which is slower than the fastest chips that U.S. companies use.

“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Lutnick said.

Nvidia said Monday night that it would soon resume sales of the H20 chip to China after the Trump administration signaled that it would grant the chipmaker necessary export licenses.

Lutnick said that the administration said that the renewed sale of H20 chips to China was linked to a rare-earths magnet deal. Lutnick said it was in U.S. interests to have Chinese companies using American technology so they continue to use an American “tech stack.”

“The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” Lutnick said. “We want to keep having the Chinese use the American technology stack, because they still rely upon it.”

Similarly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said in recent weeks that the U.S. should continue selling his chips to China so Chinese companies don’t invest in homegrown infrastructure. Huang on Sunday also said that the Chinese military wouldn’t use Nvidia chips anyway, and previously signaled that China’s Huawei is a legitimate competitor.

“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick said. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”

The reversal is a major win for Nvidia. Huang had previously said that the Trump administration’s decision to require a license for the H20 chip in April “effectively closed” the China market. Nvidia said that it could have sold $8 billion in H20 chips in the current quarter before sales were stopped.

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The administration reversed its decision after President Donald Trump met with Huang in Washington last week.

“You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” Lutnick said. “That’s the thinking.”

The H20 chip was introduced in 2022 in response to Biden administration export controls. It’s based on the same underlying technology as Nvidia’s Hopper-generation chips, which are sold in the U.S. as finished systems using H100 or H200 chips.

The U.S. chipmaker took some features out of the H20 in order to sell it to China, including fewer graphics processing unit cores and lower bandwidth connecting separate parts of the chip. But the success of the DeepSeek R1 model suggested that there were many Chinese companies that were just fine with the slowed-down chips. The China-specific H20 is behind Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the H100 and the H200, Lutnick said.

Nvidia says that it releases new artificial intelligence chips every year and that serious AI developers should always try to get the latest and greatest versions because the technology is improving so quickly.

The best AI chips broadly available from clouds and system makers today are called Blackwell, and come as a GB200 chip with a paired central processing unit as well as B100 and B200 versions. Nvidia also makes a range of Blackwell-based chips for gaming and graphics that can be used for AI, but they’re generally weaker than the biggest chips designed for data centers.

A successor, called Blackwell Ultra, is only now starting to be installed in data centers, and it’s expected to ramp in volume over the next year. In 2027, Nvidia will release “Vera Rubin” chips.

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It’s a huge week for crypto in D.C. But the industry may not get everything it wants

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It's a huge week for crypto in D.C. But the industry may not get everything it wants

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.

Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters

It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.

The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.

The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.

But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.

Seeking CLARITY

The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.

The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.

The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.

Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.

“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”

Pushing it to pass

Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.

The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.

Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.

“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”

Read more CNBC tech news

The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.

Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.

“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.

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