Gladiator 6 – Nvidia v Oracle

Since October 2022, Oracle shares have roughly quadrupled. Something extraordinary is happening at this company. I guess that something is a dramatic acceleration in the growth rate, thanks to Oracle moving decisively to seize the opportunities of AI.

We are committed to returning value to our shareholders through technical innovation, strategic acquisitions, stock repurchases, prudent use of debt and a dividend. This quarter, we repurchased a little over 1 million shares for a total of $150 million.

And over the last 10 years, we’ve reduced shares outstanding by more than 1/3 at an average share price of just over $54. In addition, we have paid out dividends of $4.7 billion over the last 12 months, and the Board of Directors again declared a quarterly dividend of $0.50 per share. Since it’s the beginning of FY ’26, I’d like to comment on the financial acceleration we expect to see in the coming years. Between our $138 billion RPO [remaining performance obligations] and even larger pipeline, we have a clear line of sight to future revenue growth. So for fiscal year 2026, I expect that total cloud revenue will grow over 40% in constant currency, up from 24% in FY ’25 I expect that cloud infrastructure revenue will grow over 70%, up from 51% in FY ’25. I expect total revenue will be at least $67 billion, up 16% in constant currency and up more than $1 billion from our prior guidance. RPO is likely to grow more than 100% in fiscal ’26. And lastly, I expect we will exceed the revenue growth target we previously provided for FY ’27. Beyond FY ’27, I’m even more confident in our ability to meet and likely exceed our previously provided FY ’29 targets. We will provide a more fulsome update on our long- range financial targets at the Financial Analyst Meeting at Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas in October. 

Safra Ada Katz, CEO, Oracle, Q4 2025, 11 June 2025

At 80, co-founder Larry Ellison is chairman and chief technology officer. I can’t help but feel encouraged by the fact that the chairman of one of the most dynamic US technology companies and the president of the USA are men of around my age. It’s not over until it is over. Like Trump, Larry Ellison has big ambitions.

Oracle’s future is bright in this new era of cloud computing. Oracle will be the #1 cloud database company. Oracle will be the #1 cloud applications company, and Oracle will be the #1 builder and operator of cloud infrastructure data centers. We will build and operate more cloud infrastructure data centers than all of our cloud infrastructure competitors combined. First, database. Most of the world’s most valuable data is stored in an Oracle database. All of those databases are moving to the cloud. Oracle’s Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure cloud, Amazon’s cloud or Google’s Cloud. Oracle runs everywhere. The latest vector version of the Oracle Database, Oracle 23 AI, is an AI data platform, the only database that can make all of the customer’s data immediately available to all of the popular AI large language models while maintaining complete data privacy for the customer. As use of AI increases, so will Oracle’s database market share. Oracle will be the largest and most profitable cloud applications company in the world. Oracle developed suites of integrated AI agent-based applications for ERP, for EPM, supply chain, manufacturing, human resources and customer engagement, plus industry applications for health care, banking, utilities, retail, hospitality and many other industries.

We use the most modern application generators and AI database technology to build our application suite. And then we add AI and analytics using OpenAI, xAI, Google, Llama and other popular LLMs on top of that application data. No other company is even attempting to build the depth and breadth of AI-based applications that we have already built. Oracle will build more cloud infrastructure data centers than all of our infrastructure competitors combined. All of our OCI data centers from the smallest low-cost data center to the largest gigawatt AI training data center include all Oracle OCI [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] capabilities. A large percentage of those capabilities are autonomous. So labor costs are minimized and human error is dramatically reduced. Oracle is already prospering in this new era of cloud computing and AI, and it’s just the beginning.

Larry Ellison, co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer, Oracle, Q4 2025, 11 June 2025

The combination of that bullish chart, the accelerating growth already being achieved, and the huge ambitions of the chairman makes Oracle an exciting investment. This is especially exciting because Oracle has been boring for 20 years. Like Microsoft before it embraced the cloud, the shares had gone to sleep. Not any more!

Enthusiastic as I am about Oracle, I would have to say that, like Carlos Alcaraz in his match against Cameron Norrie, Nvidia is in a whole different league. Since November 2022, the shares have risen some 15 times.

The fundamentals are the most impressive I have ever seen in a quoted company. Listen to Jensen Huang talking at the latest quarterly report.

We know that AI is this incredible technology that’s going to transform every industry, from, of course, the way we do software to healthcare and financial services to retail to, I guess, every industry, transportation, manufacturing. And we’re at the beginning of that.

But maybe another way to think about that is where do we need intelligence, where do we need digital intelligence? And it’s in every country, it’s in every industry. And we know because of that, we recognize that AI is also an infrastructure. It’s a way of developing a technology — delivering a technology that requires factories and these factories produce tokens. And they, as I mentioned, are important to every single industry and every single country. And so, on that basis, we’re really at the very beginning of it, because the adoption of this technology is really kind of in its early, early stages.

Now, we’ve reached an extraordinary milestone with AIs that are reasoning, are thinking, what people call inference time scaling. Of course, it created a whole new — we’ve entered an era where inference is going to be a significant part of the compute workload.

But anyhow, it’s going to be a new infrastructure, and we’re building it out in the cloud. The United States is really the early starter and available in U.S. clouds. And this is our largest market, our largest installed base, and we continue to see that happening.

But beyond that, we’re going to have to — we’re going to see AI go into enterprise, which is on-prem, because so much of the data is still on-prem. Access control is really important. It’s really hard to move all of — every company’s data into the cloud. And so, we’re going to move AI into the enterprise.

And you saw that we announced a couple of really exciting new products, our RTX Pro Enterprise AI server that runs everything enterprise and AI, our DGX Spark and DGX Station, which is designed for developers who want to work on-prem. And so, enterprise AI is just taking off.

Telcos, today, a lot of the telco infrastructure will be in the future software-defined and built on AI. And so, 6G is going to be built on AI, and that infrastructure needs to be built out. And as said, it’s very, very early stages.

And then, of course, every factory today that makes things will have an AI factory that sits with it. And the AI factory is going to be — drive creating AI and operating AI for the factory itself, but also to power the products and the things that are made by the factory. So, it’s very clear that every car company will have AI factories. And very soon, there’ll be robotics companies — robot companies, and those companies will be also building AIs to drive the robots.

And so, we’re at the beginning of all of this build-out.

Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder, Q 2026, 28 May 2025

And, unlike Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang is a mere stripling of 62.

Chinese export controls are a negative, but (a) the US government may eventually come to its senses about that one and (b) it still leaves a huge global opportunity.

Prospects for Nvidia look staggering.

Every country needs to build out AI infrastructure and their umpteenth AI factories being planned. I think in the remarks, Colette mentioned there’s some 100 AI factories being built. There’s a whole bunch that haven’t been announced.

And I think the important concept here, which makes it easier to understand, is that like other technologies that impact literally every single industry, of course, electricity was one and it became infrastructure. Of course, the information infrastructure, which we now know as the Internet affects every single industry, every country, every society.

Intelligence is surely one of those things. I don’t know any company, industry, country who thinks that intelligence is optional. It’s essential infrastructure. And so, we’ve now digitalized intelligence. And so, I think we’re clearly in the beginning of the build-out of this infrastructure. And every country will have it, I’m certain of that. Every industry will use it, that I’m certain of.

And what’s unique about this infrastructure is that it needs factories. It’s a little bit like the energy infrastructure, electricity. It needs factories. We need factories to produce this intelligence, and the intelligence is getting more sophisticated. We were talking about earlier that we had a huge breakthrough in the last couple of years with reasoning AI. And now, there are agents that reason and there are super-agents that use a whole bunch of tools and then there’s clusters of super agents where agents are working with agents, solving problems.

And so, you could just imagine, compared to one-shot chatbots and the agents that are now using AI built on these large language models, how much more compute-intensive they really need to be and are. So, I think we’re in the beginning of the build-out, and there should be many, many more announcements in the future.

Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder, Q 2026, 28 May 2025

Like Oracle, Nvidia seems to be on an accelerating growth path.

This is the start of a powerful new wave of growth. Grace Blackwell is in full production. We’re off to the races. We now have multiple significant growth engines. Inference, once the lightest part of the workload, is surging with revenue-generating AI services. AI is growing faster and will be larger than any platform shifts before, including the Internet, mobile and cloud. Blackwell is built to power the full AI life cycle from training frontier models to running complex inference and reasoning agents at scale. Training demand continues to rise with breakthroughs in post training and like reinforcement learning and synthetic data generation, but inference is exploding. Reasoning AI agents require orders of magnitude more compute.

The foundations of our next growth platforms are in place and ready to scale. Sovereign AI – nations are investing in AI infrastructure like they once did for electricity and Internet. Enterprise AI – AI must be deployable on-prem and integrated with existing IT. Our RTX Pro, DGX Spark and DGX Station enterprise AI systems are ready to modernize the $500 billion IT infrastructure on-prem or in the cloud. Every major IT provider is partnering with us. Industrial AI from training to digital twin simulation to deployment, NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac GR00T are powering next-generation factories and humanoid robotic systems worldwide.

The age of AI is here from AI infrastructures, inference at scale, sovereign AI, enterprise AI, and industrial AI, NVIDIA is ready.

Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder, Q 2026, 28 May 2025

All this, and Nvidia is a machine for innovation. Who knows what wonders the future may hold?

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Oracle ORCL

Nvidia NVDA

The difference between Oracle and Nvidia is that Oracle is promising to do amazing things, while Nvidia is already doing them. Not that Oracle is doing badly. By any normal standards, it is an incredible performer. It is just that Nvidia is out of this world.

In Oracle’s favour is that Nvidia has a huge fan club; Oracle’s is just starting to build.