How did renting computational power and storage — and making maintaining someone’s services easier via the internet — become “running things in the cloud”?
The person who coined that term was a marketing genius, but tracing the origin of the term is difficult.
Notwithstanding the nonsensical term, switching to the cloud became easier for most companies than setting up and maintaining network infrastructure themselves.
Switching from an on-premises server to one “in the cloud” has some upsides. If you don’t know how many servers you need and how powerful they have to be, it is much easier to use the cloud.
Related: Analyst sends Alphabet warning amid search market shakeup
As you develop your service and get more users, you can scale up and add more CPU power or storage with just a couple of clicks, or even automatically.
And you don’t have to think about power outages and replacing broken hardware, either.
There are downsides, though, including data security concerns, dependence on a good internet connection, and the fact that some setups, if they automatically scale, can leave you with a very large bill, due to an unexpected surge in demand for your services.
Big businesses have large and complex databases and need to run somewhere, too. If the company uses Oracle’s database solution, it is much easier to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Perhaps this is the main driver of Oracle’s growth in the cloud computing space.
Oracle Cloud revenue reached $6.7 billion in Q4 2025.
Image source: Shutterstock
Oracle sales surge on cloud AI push
Oracle Corporation (ORCL) offers a special service it calls MultiCloud. This service makes connecting different cloud infrastructures easier and enables you to run OCI Oracle Database services in any cloud.
That makes mixing cloud providers easier. You can combine Google Cloud and/or Amazon Web Services with Oracle’s offerings.
Oracle reported its fiscal 2025 Q4 earnings results on June 11.
During the earnings call, CEO Safra Catz said, “Our infrastructure business was the next area to move to the cloud. We made engineering decisions that were much different from the other hyperscalers and that were better suited to the needs of enterprise customers, resulting in lower costs to them and giving them deployment flexibility.”
Related: Analysts raise Micron stock price target, send warning
Catz added that she expects OCI revenue to grow over 70% this current year.
Other Oracle earnings report highlights included:
- Total revenue was $15.9 billion, up 11% year-over-year.
- Diluted earnings per share of $1.19 compared to $1.11 in Q4 fiscal 2024.
- Cloud revenue of $6.7 billion, up 27% YoY.
- GAAP net income was $3.4 billion, up 9% YoY.
“MultiCloud database revenue from Amazon, Google, and Azure grew 115% from Q3 to Q4,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison. He noted that the company has 23 MultiCloud datacenters, and 47 more will be built within a year.
Triple-digit MultiCloud revenue growth is expected to continue in fiscal year 2026, added Ellison.
Oracle CEO says company is off to a ‘strong start’ in fiscal 2026
Oracle submitted a filing to the SEC on June 30. In it, Catz offered the following message, including two critical words that conveyed confidence in the company’s performance.
“Oracle is off to a strong start in [fiscal year 2026],” she said.
“Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements, including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in [fiscal year 2028],” Catz added.
The company revealed in June that AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs will be available on OCI. These offerings are expected to provide more than two times better price-performance for large-scale AI training and inference workloads than the previous generation.
More Tech Stocks:
- Amazon tries to make AI great again (or maybe for the first time)
- Veteran portfolio manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms move
- Google plans major AI shift after Meta’s surprising $14 billion move
Yet counting on AI isn’t enough. The company also shared in June that it will launch something that is a bit of an oxymoron: an air-gapped cloud offering.
As noted previously, the main problem with the cloud is data security, and not every organization can allow its data to be accessible via the internet.
The company is calling its new offering Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Isolated. With a target audience of governments and regulated industries, it is a sovereign compute cloud service that can be disconnected from the internet.
According to the company, the service can be deployed in a single rack and scaled up as needed. It is expected to be available globally later this year.
It’s almost a bit humorous that “the cloud” can be repackaged as an on-premises system, even when handled by a third party.
But since Oracle seems to be successfully differentiating itself with its special offerings, perhaps the air-gapped cloud will be a hit, much like the MultiCloud.