Oracle scores cloud customer - maybe China's TEMU - that wants any available server, anytime, anywhere

Oracle has surfed demand for cloud services to post revenues that beat its own forecast, fuelled by demand for non-AI cloud services.

Big Red on Wednesday announced $15.9 billion revenue for Q4 2025, an eleven percent year-over-year jump that helped the company to improve net income by nine percent to $3.4 billion. Cloud infrastructure - good old- fashioned IaaS - was the star of the show as its $3 billion revenue haul represented 50 percent growth.

Full-year revenue rose eight percent to $57.4 billion and net income grew 19 percent to $12.4 billion. IaaS was again the standout, growing overall revenue by 51 percent to $10.2 billion and consumption revenue by 59 points.

Chair and CTO Larry Ellison told investors demand for cloud services is both "astronomical" and "insatiable". Oracle is trying its best to keep its feet on the ground and sate customers.

"We recently got an order that said we'll take all the capacity you have wherever it is," he said on the company's earnings call. "It could be in Europe, could be in Asia, we'll just take everything."

"We never got an order like that before," he added. "We had to move things around. We did the best we could to give them the capacity they needed."

Ellison didn't name the customer but later said Oracle has won a "gigantic deal" with TEMU - almost certainly a reference to the controversial Chinese e-tailer that's accused of reselling products made by forced laborers, undercutting small businesses outside China by using tax loopholes the Trump administration moved to close, and saw its apps banned in Indonesia.

US-based Think Tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies has described TEMU as "information-gathering spyware program masquerading as an e-commerce site."

On Oracle's earnings call Ellison described TEMU as "a very large company that's growing extremely rapidly and they're basically moving their infrastructure to the Oracle Cloud."

Oracle's relationship with TikTok means it has experience handling sensitive Chinese companies.

Ellison pointed out that the TEMU deal has nothing to do with AI, to demonstrate that Oracle is doing well in multiple markets including its flagship database.

The result Ellison seemed most enthused by was 115 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in revenue from Oracle databases running in Azure and AWS and predicted further triple-digit growth in FY 2026.

Financial analysts on the earnings call gushed about Oracle's results as revenue came in at the top end of past guidance. One noted that Oracle's quarterly capital expenditure - all $21 billion of it - also blew past forecasts by $5 billion. CEO Safra Catz explained that Oracle's capex spikes when datacenter builds end and it buys kit to fill them. She also predicted quarterly capex could hit $25 billion next year. If sustained across 2026, Oracle will be spending similar sums to Google and Microsoft.

Catz forecast revenue growth of between 11 and 13 percent for Q1 of 2026 and said Oracle may need to revisit a previous long-term forecast of $104 billion annual revenue by 2029 - probably to raise it.

Investors liked what they heard and sent Oracle shares up almost eight percent in after-hours trading. ®