Oracle shares tumbled around 7 percent on Monday after Q2 2025 revenues disappointed financial markets.
Throughout 2024, Big Red impressed investors with its revenue and cloud services growth, but the [latest figures](https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2024/Oracle-Announces-Fiscal-2025-Second-Quarter-Financial-Results/default.aspx) offer a reality check to its lofty ambitions.
Total revenue for the second quarter ended November 30 reached $14.06 billion, narrowly missing market expectations of $14.1 billion.
Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir, explained that Oracle has a long history of beating market expectations, so even slightly undershooting them could spook investors.
Expectations for AI companies are also "overheated," she told Reuters. Oracle has in recent years struggled to paint itself as an AI company, despite databases, applications, middleware, and infrastructure making up the bulk of its offerings.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz told investors to expect revenue growth of between 7 and 9 percent. Reports suggest that analysts were expecting a higher rate.
Despite the after-trading dip in its valuation, Oracle has performed well this year, gaining around 80 percent of its value and set for its highest growth in nearly 25 years.
Catz told investors that multi-cloud agreements with Microsoft, Google, and AWS provide customers more choice in how they can migrate their Oracle databases to the cloud.
Co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison said Microsoft is the only partner where the contract is more than a year old. Nonetheless, the deals were going to provide "well over" $100 million in revenue in their first year. Meanwhile, Oracle has bolstered its credentials in AI by striking a deal with Meta to provide infrastructure for the social media giant's Llama large language models.
Ellison claimed that in this context, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was "faster and less expensive than other clouds."
"Oracle-trained AI models and AI agents will improve the rate of scientific discovery, economic development, and corporate growth throughout the world. The scale of the opportunity is unimaginable," he said, with characteristic hyperbole. ®