Oracle reports fiscal fourth-quarter results late Wednesday. With shares of the database software giant already trending up in recent weeks, Oracle stock analysts with Barclays are projecting a "comeback quarter."
After a rough start to the year, Oracle stock has rallied more than 45% from a 2025 low-point reached on April 11. Concerns about the company's heightened AI spending and the broader economy weighed on shares in the early going. Back-to-back earnings letdowns didn't help either. But investor optimism is rising on the heels of a trade deal with China and a strong earnings season for some of Oracle's tech peers.
"Microsoft and CoreWeave earnings showed that AI data center capacity constraints are easing, which could also help Oracle to start turning its huge RPO (remaining performance obligations) backlog into revenue," Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow wrote in a recent client note.
Lenschow rates Oracle stock a positive overweight with a 202 price target.
Analysts with Jefferies on Monday reiterated a buy call for Oracle stock and upped their price target to 200 from 190, citing feedback in a customer survey that pointed to "steady demand."
On the stock market today, Oracle stock added 1.8% to close at 177.15. Shares are ahead 7% year-to-date and up 42% compared to 12 months ago.
Oracle Fiscal Q4 Preview: Numbers To Watch
Analysts polled by FactSet are looking for Oracle's adjusted earnings to increase 1% to $1.64 per share. Sales are seen rising 9% to $15.6 billion for the May-ended quarter.
Beyond those numbers, Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci expects "all eyes" will be on the growth rate for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is the key to Oracle's push to be an AI leader. It provides cloud-computing services to enterprises, competing against cloud giants Amazon and Microsoft.
Momentum for Oracle in winning AI-related cloud business helped carry the stock to a 60% gain last year. That marked Oracle stock's best performance since 1999.
But Oracle missed earnings and sales estimates with its fiscal third-quarter results in March, pushing its stock lower. The company said at the time that it was racing to build data center capacity for AI, but ran into some industrywide supply constraints. Oracle Chief Executive Safra Catz highlighted that remaining performance obligations — a backlog metric — grew 63% to a record $130 billion.
"Coming off a quarter with a massive increase in RPO but soft revenues, investors want to see Oracle deliver in the ever-important (fiscal Q4)," DiFucci wrote in a recent client note. "We believe the primary driver of the stock reaction will be IaaS performance and whether Oracle can deliver 50%-plus growth for fiscal year 2025."
IaaS refers to cloud infrastructure-as-a-service revenue. Oracle's cloud infrastructure revenue grew 49% in its February-ended quarter.
Watching Stargate, TikTok
Meanwhile, Oracle is a partner in the Trump-endorsed Stargate initiative, along with SoftBank, OpenAI and others. The project aims open a series of new data centers focused on AI across the U.S., backed by private investment of $100 billion that could reach $500 billion by 2029.
Investors will be listening for updates on the massive project. The Financial Times reported last month that Oracle will spend $4o billion on processors from Nvidia Stargate, which will be used by OpenAI.
Another area investors might want updates: TikTok.
Oracle is expected to be involved in the bidding for TikTok's U.S. operations, if the social media platform's Chinese parent company ByteDance follows through on a legally-mandated sale. President Donald Trump is reportedly readying a third 90-day delay for the law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok. The current deadline in June 19.
Oracle Stock: Three Week Uptrend
Oracle stock, meanwhile, is in a three-week uptrend as it works back to highs from December. MarketSurge shows the stock is long consolidation pattern with a buy point at 198.31, which was Oracle's record high that it reached in December.
Oracle stock has an IBD Composite Rating of 85 out of 99, according to IBD Stock Checkup. The score combines five separate proprietary ratings into one rating. The best growth stocks typically have a Composite Rating of 90 or better.
Oracle's IBD Relative Strength Rating is 84 out of 99. The RS Rating means that Oracle has outperformed 84% of all stocks in IBD's database over the past year. But the score is down from 88 just a week earlier.
