Oracle Promises AI Empire With Less Money, Just Ignore Quarterly Whimper

KEY POINTS

•Oracle missed its Q3 revenue estimates announced December 4, causing shares to fall over 11% after hours.
•Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk reassured investors the company’s AI data center expansion will require less than the speculative $100 billion expected.
•Despite the revenue miss, Oracle reported a strong 14% year-over-year growth and earnings per share of $2.26 beating estimates.

Oracle missed Q3 revenue targets so badly their shares tumbled 11% after hours—Larry Ellison can't line-code his way out of this one. Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk comforted panicked analysts on December 4th, assuring Oracle’s gargantuan AI data center build-out will cost ‘less if not substantially less’ than some mysterious $100 billion figure analysts pulled from the ether. Despite that miss, Oracle still bragged 14% yearly revenue growth and earnings-per-share crushing Wall Street at $2.26 vs $1.64. Meanwhile, OpenAI—their biggest client funding multi-billion dollar cloud deals—might actually deliver on its promises one day, possibly in the next decade. In the lobby, investors are nervously reading TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood's note about ‘Capex & financing needs’ like it's a horror story.