Oracle Corporation (ORCL)

Oracle sells enterprise databases and applications, migrates that base to its own cloud, and rents capacity for training AI models.

The historical base is the Oracle relational database and the applications around it: accounting, human resources, enterprise resource planning. Customers are large and conservative, licences run for years, and replacing the system is expensive and risky — hence predictable revenue and high-margin support.

The recent bet is OCI, the company's cloud infrastructure. Oracle entered that market after Amazon, Microsoft and Google and competes on price and on easy migration for its own customers — and lately by renting compute for training large models under long contracts. Investors read the backlog of those commitments as the primary indicator of future growth.

The other side is capital spending and debt: AI data centres are built and paid for ahead of the revenue they will carry. A separate question is concentration — a large part of the contracted volume sits with a small number of customers, whose ability to pay therefore becomes a factor for Oracle itself.