Oracle, a veteran technology stock, has recently become a prominent player in the US AI wave, second only to Nvidia.
On Wednesday's US stock market close, Oracle rose 4.8%, hitting a new high for the fifth consecutive day. In the past 12 months, Oracle has risen by 73%, outperforming a host of large technology stocks such as Amazon, Apple, Alphabet-C, etc. With the recent surge, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's net worth has surpassed Bill Gates, making him the world's fourth richest person.
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The driving force behind Oracle's rise mainly comes from AI.
Oracle's Q4 FY2023 (March 1 - May 31) earnings report released after the US stock market on Monday showed that the company's core business cloud services and license support revenue recorded revenue of $9.37 billion, a YoY increase of 25%, including $1.4 billion in revenue from cloud infrastructure (IaaS), a QoQ increase of 76%. The company's next quarter performance guidance also exceeded Wall Street expectations.
The growth of cloud business is mainly driven by the procurement of AI development companies. Company executives said that Oracle's second-generation cloud service platform, Gen 2 Cloud, has quickly become the first choice for AI companies because Oracle has the world's highest performance and lowest cost GPU cluster technology, even Nvidia uses Oracle clusters as its AI infrastructure.
Before this year's surge, Oracle had long been seen as the laggard among large technology stocks. In terms of SaaS services, it is far behind the leader Salesforce; as a computing power provider, its market share is only about 5%, far less than Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alphabet-C cloud.
However, in attracting AI customers, Oracle's main selling point is &#34;cheap and reliable&#34; compared to competitors such as Microsoft, Alphabet-C, and Amazon.
According to reports, Oracle's prices are usually 23% to 33% cheaper than other cloud service providers, and its data centers are specifically configured with hardware for running image recognition models and large language models, making AI model operation faster.
After the earnings report was released, Goldman Sachs upgraded its rating on Oracle from &#34;sell&#34; to &#34;hold.&#34;
Goldman Sachs wrote in its report that Oracle's outstanding performance shows that:
<blockquote>
&#34;Oracle's advertised price/performance advantage over ultra-large companies is resonating with the market (including new and existing customers), which should give the company sustainable share growth, despite its late entry into IaaS.&#34;
</blockquote>

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Thanks to AI, not only NVIDIA, but also Oracle have made a comeback.

Just behind Nvidia, there is another low-key old-school tech stock that has skyrocketed in the US stock market.