Tech and AI

Oracle delivered 850 megawatts of data centre capacity in one quarter as its order book reaches 664 billion dollars

By Staff Writer  |  12 September 2026

Oracle reported first quarter results for its 2027 financial year on 10 September. Cloud infrastructure revenue rose 121 per cent to 7.4 billion dollars, the company delivered 850 megawatts of additional data centre capacity in the three months to 31 August, and remaining performance obligations, the contracted work it has not yet performed, stood at 664 billion dollars against 455 billion a year earlier.

The headline figures are ordinary enough for a large software company having a good year. Total revenues rose 30 per cent to 19.3 billion dollars. Total cloud revenues, infrastructure and applications together, rose 62 per cent to 11.6 billion. Software revenues fell 3 per cent to 5.5 billion as customers moved off software installed on their own premises. Earnings per share on the statutory measure rose 55 per cent to 1.56 dollars.

The figures that matter to anyone who builds things are further down. Oracle said it had delivered 850 megawatts of additional data centre capacity in the quarter, along with more than 300,000 graphics processors, and that this was almost triple the capacity it delivered in the preceding three months. Capital expenditure for the quarter was 28.5 billion dollars, against 8.5 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. Property, plant and equipment on the balance sheet went from 100.0 billion dollars at 31 May to 127.8 billion at 31 August, a rise of 27.9 billion in thirteen weeks.

What 850 megawatts means on the ground

Eight hundred and fifty megawatts of connected load, delivered in a single quarter by one company, is the same order of magnitude as a large conventional power station. It has to be built, cooled, energised and connected, and the grid connection is usually the binding constraint rather than the building.

Clayton Magouyrk, one of Oracle's two chief executives, set the quarter against the two periods before it on the company's earnings call. The company attributed the rate of delivery to years of prior investment across its infrastructure, from the buildings outwards.

almost three times what we delivered in all of Q4, and 73 percent of the total capacity delivered last fiscal year

Clayton Magouyrk, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle Corporation, 10 September 2026

The order book behind that programme grew rather than shrank. Remaining performance obligations rose by 209 billion dollars over the year to 664 billion, after the company booked more than 30 billion dollars of new artificial intelligence cloud contracts in the quarter alone. Oracle said that because of the way those contracts are structured there is no additional effect on its plans to raise capital.

The cash position

Operating cash flow for the quarter was 23 billion dollars, up 184 per cent. Free cash flow was negative 5 billion, because the capital programme is running ahead of the cash the business generates. During the quarter Oracle sold 20 billion dollars of common stock through an at-the-market programme. The board declared a dividend of 50 cents a share, payable on 23 October to holders of record on 9 October.

For the full year the company now expects total revenue of at least 90 billion dollars and earnings per share on the adjusted measure of 8.10 dollars. Whether that is achievable turns less on demand, which the company says continues to run ahead of supply, than on whether the capacity can be built and connected on the dates the contracts assume. On the evidence of one quarter, the constraint has moved from the order book to the supply chain and the grid.