Technology giant Oracle, whose shares are up more than 40% this year, will report quarterly earnings after the close of trading on September 9. The market expects the company to confirm the acceleration of revenue growth due to cloud services and demand for AI infrastructure. But experts warn: even if Oracle lives up to its ambitious forecasts, the rally should not be expected to repeat.

What's in store for the market

Oracle's report for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended Aug. 31, is expected to show total revenue growth of 13% year-over-year, the fastest pace in more than two years, Bloomberg writes, citing analyst consensus. Cloud infrastructure sales are expected to grow 56% from a year ago.

The pressure on Oracle is intensifying after the stock rally this year - to support the quotes, the company needs to demonstrate accelerated revenue growth due to investments in artificial intelligence. To miss the high expectations is to face a fall in the stock, the agency notes. A similar thing happened to Salesforce: its stock fell more than 8% when a report showed that the company's AI-based products are not paying off as quickly as investors had hoped.

What the analysts are saying

Barclays analysis shows that Oracle may beat consensus forecasts, said the bank's analyst Raimo Lenshaw. On the eve of the report Barclays reaffirmed its recommendation to buy the company's securities with Overweight rating and raised the target price on them from $221 to $281. It assumes growth of securities by 18%.

Lenschow believes that this quarterly report of the company "will be very different from previous ones" because of a major new contract, CNBC writes. In late June, Oracle announced a cloud contract with annual revenue of $30 billion, with revenue expected to begin in fiscal 2028. Oracle did not disclose the customer, but TD Cowen analyst Derrick Wood speculated that it could be OpenAI.

"The main thing I expect from this report is the answer to the question of whether the cloud business will continue to grow," said Freedom Capital Markets managing director Paul Meeks. He doesn't expect a repeat of last quarter's scenario, when Oracle beat analysts' expectations and forecast an acceleration in cloud revenue growth from 24% in fiscal 2025 to 40% next year. "Oracle has already proven that its cloud business benefits from AI, but now needs to validate that," Meeks concluded.

There are signs that the company's growth prospects are likely to continue. Reports from Microsoft and CoreWeave showed accelerating demand for AI infrastructure, which could be seen as a positive signal for Oracle, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana said.

But even if Oracle lives up to Wall Street's ambitious forecasts, we shouldn't expect a repeat of last quarter's stock boom, says Huntington National Bank portfolio manager Randy Hare.

"Investors already have a pretty good handle on AI-related growth figures for most companies in the sector. So the high-profile surprises are probably behind us," he said.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor

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