Larry Ellison, the founder and chairman of software giant Oracle, is the latest tech entrepreneur to reap the rewards of the A.I. boom. The billionaire is currently the world’s third wealthiest person and briefly surpassed Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos as the second richest person this week (behind Elon Musk). A recent Oracle stock surge has sent Ellison’s net worth soaring to an estimated $203.5 billion.
Fueling Ellison’s good fortune is an unprecedented demand for data centers, which power the A.I. models underpinning products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Oracle beat Wall Street’s expectations earlier this month when it reported a 7 percent year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue to $13.3 billion, with the company’s cloud services revenue skyrocketing by 21 percent to $5.6 billion. The news has been a booster for Oracle’s share price, which has soared more than 47 percent in the past 12 months and almost doubled since the beginning of 2023.
Oracle currently has 162 data centers in operation and under construction globally, Ellison told analysts during a recent earnings call, adding that he expects the company to eventually have 1,000 to 2,000 of these facilities. The company’s largest data center is 800 megawatts and will contain “acres” of Nvidia (NVDA)’s graphics processing units (GPUs) to train A.I. models, he said.
Nvidia’s GPUs have been in high demand as Big Tech races to deploy A.I. products. During an Oracle financial analyst meeting on Sept. 12, Ellison described a dinner with Elon Musk and Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, where the Oracle head and Musk were “begging” Jensen for more A.I. chips. “Please take our money. No, take more of it. You’re not taking enough, we need you to take more of it,” recalled Ellison, who said the strategy worked.
Partnering up with rivals
Oracle also recently bolstered its database power by partnering up with Amazon’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The deal, which will allow customers to access Oracle’s database offerings within AWS, follows a slew of similar cloud partnerships the company has struck with the likes of Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOGL). “We believe our cloud partnerships with AWS and Microsoft and Google will turbocharge the growth of our database business for years to come,” said Ellison during the earnings call.
Ellison, 80, co-founded Oracle in 1977 and helmed the company as CEO until 2014. He also recently made headlines for his financial backing of the acquisition of Paramount (PARA) by Skydance, a media company founded by his son David Ellison. He reportedly is set to have an influential role in the takeover as a major shareholder.
But for the time being, the billionaire appears to be firmly stationed on A.I.—and he has grand ambitions for the new technology. In addition to generative A.I.’s potential to help spot forest fires and identify agricultural output needs via drones, he lauded the ability of A.I.-enabled cameras to enhance surveillance while speaking at Oracle’s financial analyst meeting. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he noted. Police officers, meanwhile, will be supervised at all times, with body cameras prepared to alert the appropriate authorities of any misconduct. “The world is going to be a better place as we exploit these opportunities and take advantage of this great technology,” he added.
But who will take advantage first remains up in the air. “There’s really one winner. Someone’s going to be better at this than anyone else, and multiple people are trying,” said Ellison of the A.I. boom, likening the technology arms race to “Formula 1.”
