Oracle’s office in Melbourne, Australia, photographed in December 2023. Credit: Shkuru Afshar / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) Oracle said free cash flow will reach $30B in the year to May 2029, when analysts expected it to stay negative. It capped new fundraising at $20B through May 2030 and kept its $225B revenue target. Shares rose as much as 14%.
Oracle shares jumped as much as 14% on Wednesday after the company said its free cash flow would reach $30B in the year ending May 2029, Bloomberg reported. Analysts had expected the figure to still be negative that year. Chief financial officer Hilary Maxson, who joined in April, gave the forecast at Oracle’s annual conference in Las Vegas. She said cash flow would turn positive late in fiscal 2028, after two years of peak spending on data centres.
At the same event, Oracle said it would rent out Google’s chips in its cloud. Oracle has been turning itself from a database company into a seller of AI computing power, building data centres for OpenAI and others. That push sent its free cash flow to minus $23.7B in the year to May 2026, after it spent $55.7B on data centres. The spending has worried investors and lenders.
S&P cut Oracle’s credit rating to one notch above junk in July, and the stock had lost 33% this year before Wednesday’s jump. To calm those fears, Oracle said it would limit new fundraising to $20B through May 2030, split evenly between shares and debt, according to its statement. Other sources of money will cover part of the gap. “Vendor financing, customer-provided hardware and customer prepayments are expected to reduce upfront cash requirements through the transition to positive free cash flow,” the company said. Oracle also kept its target of at least $225B in revenue in fiscal 2030.
Maxson said it would add seven gigawatts of data centre capacity in the next couple of years, taking its fleet past 10 gigawatts by the end of fiscal 2028. The plan “could ease concern about elevated capital spending beyond the next two years,” said Anurag Rana, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Oracle is not alone, as AI spending is squeezing Big Tech’s cash flow. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
