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Oracle, the software company Larry Ellison founded in 1977, has signed contracts worth a record $664 billion that it has not yet delivered on, a backlog built almost entirely on demand for artificial intelligence computing power.
The figure is what accountants call remaining performance obligations, meaning revenue a company has contracted to earn but has not yet recognised because the work has not been done. It rose $26 billion from the previous quarter and $209 billion from a year earlier, according to first quarter fiscal 2027 results released on Thursday, Sept. 10. Reuters reported that roughly half of the total is expected to convert into sales within 36 months.
Oracle booked more than $30 billion in additional AI cloud contracts during the quarter. The company said customer demand for training and running AI models continues to grow faster than the capacity it can supply.
Ellison, 82, is Oracle's executive chairman and chief technology officer and owns more than 40 percent of the company. Forbes valued him at $201.8 billion on Friday morning, ranking him seventh in the world. Bloomberg's index put him at $208 billion on Sept. 10, also in seventh place.
The backlog is at a record and the stock is not
The numbers underneath the headline figure were strong across the board.
Total revenue rose 30 percent to $19.3 billion. Cloud revenue grew 62 percent to $11.6 billion, with cloud infrastructure up 121 percent to $7.4 billion and cloud applications up 10 percent to $4.2 billion. Earnings per share under generally accepted accounting principles rose 55 percent to $1.56, while the non-GAAP measure rose 30 percent to $1.92. Net income available to common shareholders reached $4.7 billion, up 60 percent.
Oracle delivered an additional 850 megawatts of data centre capacity during the quarter and said it had supplied more than 300,000 graphics processing units to AI cloud customers since the end of the previous quarter, nearly triple what it delivered in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.
None of that has spared Ellison a punishing year. His fortune is down $39.8 billion in 2026, a decline of 16.1 percent, and he lost $8.84 billion on Sept. 10 alone. In September 2025 he briefly overtook Elon Musk as the world's richest person, with Bloomberg valuing him near $388 billion when Oracle traded above $345 a share. By mid-July this year Forbes had him at roughly $175 billion, a fall of more than $200 billion in under ten months, after Oracle shares lost more than half their value.
The market has spent the past year questioning whether the spending required to service this backlog is worth what the backlog will eventually pay.
What the contracts cost to fulfil
Oracle reported record operating cash flow of $23 billion for the quarter and free cash flow of negative $5 billion. The gap is capital expenditure, and it implies the company spent roughly $28 billion in three months on data centres, chips and the power to run them. Reuters reported that the cash burn was smaller than analysts had expected, which is part of why the shares rose about 3 percent in early trading on Sept. 11.
The company expects to raise approximately $40 billion through debt and equity during fiscal 2027, following a $20 billion common stock sale completed during the first quarter.
That is the trade at the heart of Oracle's position. A contracted backlog is only worth what it costs to deliver, and Oracle is funding delivery with borrowed money and new shares while the revenue arrives over years. The previous quarter's $85 billion increase in the backlog came in part from large AI contracts involving customer prepayments or customer-supplied graphics processors, arrangements that reduce Oracle's own capital burden on those specific deals but say nothing about the rest.
Oracle ended fiscal 2026 with a backlog of $638 billion. It stood at $455 billion a year ago, when chief executive Safra Catz said she expected it to pass half a trillion dollars within months.
Guidance and the wider Ellison position
Oracle now expects total revenue of at least $90 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $8.10 in fiscal 2027, and revenue growth of 30 to 34 percent in the second quarter.
Ellison's wealth is not tied to Oracle alone, though the company accounts for the overwhelming share of it. He holds a stake in Tesla, owns most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai, runs a sailing team and owns the Indian Wells tennis tournament. He has also committed more than $40 billion in equity financing to support his son David Ellison's bid, through Paramount Skydance, for Warner Bros. Discovery, a $110 billion transaction that a coalition of 12 states has sued to block. He took a position in the United States operation of TikTok as part of the arrangement requiring ByteDance to give up majority control.
Ellison served as Oracle's chief executive from 1977 until 2014 and has remained its largest shareholder throughout, which is why a company that spent three decades known for database software now determines the ranking of one of the wealthiest people alive.
Oracle gave no figure for how much of the $664 billion carries prepayments or customer-supplied hardware.
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