Oracle Shares Rise 2.7% Ahead Of Sept. 10 Earnings As Investors Eye $638B AI Backlog This Week In Austin

AUSTIN, Texas — Shares of Oracle Corp. climbed $4.29, or 2.70%, to $163.08 as of 10:37 a.m. ET Tuesday, extending a rebound heading into the company's fiscal first-quarter earnings report, scheduled for release after market close Thursday, Sept. 10.

Tuesday's gain builds on a roughly 3% jump in premarket trading, with shares climbing from Friday's close of $158.77 to open well above that level, according to chart data reviewed ahead of the report. The move reflects growing investor anticipation heading into what analysts have described as a pivotal earnings release, given the central role Oracle's cloud infrastructure business has played in the company's stock performance throughout the year.

Analysts polled by financial data providers expect Oracle to report revenue of approximately $19.13 billion for the quarter, alongside adjusted earnings per share of $1.74. According to TipRanks, options markets are pricing in a potential post-earnings move of as much as 11.2% in either direction, reflecting the significant uncertainty investors currently attach to the report.

Much of that uncertainty centers on Oracle's massive remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue that has become a closely watched barometer of the company's cloud infrastructure growth trajectory. Oracle's backlog currently stands at approximately $638 billion, a figure investors will be watching closely for signs of continued growth or any indication that the pace of new bookings has begun to slow.

Oracle enters Thursday's report following a difficult stretch for its stock in 2026. Shares remain down roughly 19% year to date, according to Yahoo Finance, even as Wall Street's consensus price target of $254.68 implies significant potential upside from current trading levels. That gap between the stock's depressed current price and analysts' considerably more optimistic price targets reflects a broader debate among investors over how to value Oracle's aggressive, debt-funded expansion into artificial intelligence data center infrastructure.

Concerns over Oracle's balance sheet have weighed heavily on the stock in recent months. The company issued $18 billion in investment-grade bonds last year to help fund its data center buildout, with some reports suggesting Oracle may ultimately need to raise as much as $100 billion in total to support its continued expansion plans. Negative free cash flow, driven by soaring capital expenditures that reached $2.74 billion in a recent quarter alone, has further fueled investor questions about when the company will return to sustained positive cash generation even as its underlying cloud infrastructure revenue continues growing rapidly.

One investor described the current dynamic surrounding Oracle's stock in stark terms in comments cited by TipRanks, characterizing the recent pullback in the shares as "the unwinding" of the market's earlier, more unequivocally bullish stance toward the company's AI-driven growth story.

Despite those balance sheet concerns, Wall Street sentiment toward Oracle heading into Thursday's report remains largely positive. According to StockAnalysis.com, the average rating among 44 analysts covering the stock is "Buy," with a 12-month price target of $242.69, implying more than 50% upside from recent trading levels. Morgan Stanley analyst Sanjit Singh recently raised his price target on the stock slightly to $210 from $207 ahead of the report, while Mizuho has maintained an Outperform rating on Oracle heading into earnings, expressing more bullish sentiment toward the company than toward fellow enterprise software company Adobe, which is also reporting results this week.

Oracle's fiscal year 2026 results, reported earlier this year, showed revenue of $67.36 billion, an increase of 17.35% compared with the prior year's $57.40 billion, while earnings climbed 36.49% to $16.98 billion. That strong underlying growth has helped sustain investor interest in the stock even amid the broader concerns over financing and capital spending tied to the company's data center expansion.

Oracle's earnings arrive during a busy week for corporate reports more broadly, with GameStop and customer engagement software company Braze also scheduled to report earnings Tuesday after market close, while Adobe is set to report its own results Thursday alongside Oracle, giving investors an opportunity to directly compare sentiment across two of the market's most closely watched enterprise software names in the same trading session.

The race to capitalize on soaring demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure has increasingly brought Oracle into direct competition with other cloud infrastructure providers, including newer entrants such as Nebius, as major technology companies and AI developers continue seeking additional computing capacity to support the training and deployment of increasingly large AI models. Oracle's ability to continue winning and fulfilling large-scale infrastructure contracts, reflected in its substantial backlog, remains central to the bull case for the stock even as skeptics continue raising questions about the sustainability of the company's current spending trajectory.

Technical analysis of Oracle's stock chart heading into Tuesday's session showed the shares trading above both their 50-period and 200-period moving averages, a pattern some technical analysts have characterized as a bullish signal ahead of the earnings report. Zooming out over a longer period, Oracle shares fell from the mid-$140s in mid-July to a low near $112 in late July, before rallying to a mid-August high, pulling back into the low $140s, and then trading in a range roughly between $136 and $148 before buyers returned to push the stock higher heading into September.

With Thursday's report set to offer the clearest picture yet of how Oracle's cloud infrastructure business has performed amid its continued heavy capital investment, investors will be watching closely for updates on the company's backlog growth, cash flow trajectory and overall guidance for the remainder of fiscal year 2027. Given the scale of the potential post-earnings move already being priced into options markets, Thursday's results appear positioned to serve as a significant catalyst for Oracle shares one way or another, regardless of whether the report ultimately validates the bullish long-term price targets many analysts currently maintain on the stock or reinforces the concerns that have contributed to its steep decline so far in 2026.