Oracle Takes Run at Cloud’s Big Three With Trump-Backed AI Pact

Oracle Corp. has charged out of the gate in 2025, after its best year in a quarter-century. A plan unveiled with President Donald Trump has intensified hopes that its cloud business will see a tailwind from artificial intelligence.

The stock’s latest advance came on news the software company is forming a $100 billion joint venture with SoftBank Group Corp. and OpenAI to fund an expansion of data centers to support a business in which Oracle lags behind rivals like Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

“This certainly has us looking at the name in a way we hadn’t before, since this could represent a meaningful inflection in growth,” said Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder. “It seems like it is in good company here, but my main hesitation is about how long this halo might last, since the stock has really rocketed.”

Oracle shares have performed like some of the tech giants that have driven the market’s gains for the past two years, as it seeks to establish itself as a major player in cloud computing. The stock is up more than 10% in January after posting a nearly 60% gain last year, its best performance since 1999. Shares edged 0.2% higher on Thursday.

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