As Oracle Chases AI Dominance, Restructuring And Layoffs Overshadow Record Cloud Growth Create Investor Uncertainty

Oracle Corp ORCL has been making bold moves in 2025 to dominate the AI landscape, fueling strong cloud growth and 37% year-to-date stock gains, even as the company undergoes internal restructuring to manage costs. Here’s what investors need to know.

What To Know: The tech giant recently announced it will embed OpenAI's advanced GPT-5 model across its database and SaaS portfolio, including Fusion Cloud and NetSuite. This move, coupled with an expanded partnership to integrate Google's Gemini 2.5 suite into Oracle Cloud, underscores the company’s recent AI-powered enterprise solutions.

This strategy is supported by robust financial performance. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, Oracle reported revenue of $15.9 billion and an adjusted EPS of $1.70, handily beating Wall Street estimates.

The company's cloud business was a standout, with total cloud revenue up 27% year-over-year, led by a 52% surge in Cloud Infrastructure. Management projects OCI growth will accelerate to over 70% in fiscal 2026.

To fund this aggressive AI expansion, Oracle is also focusing on operational efficiency. The company has initiated layoffs within its cloud unit and is reorganizing its leadership, highlighted by the recent departure of longtime Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson.

With its stock up 37% year-to-date, investors are optimistic. All eyes are now on Oracle’s next earnings report on September 8, where analysts expect an EPS of $1.48 on $15.03 billion in revenue, to see if the high-growth, AI-focused strategy continues to pay off.

Benzinga Edge Rankings: Based on Benzinga Edge stock rankings, Oracle displays exceptional Momentum with a score of 92.09, indicating strong positive price movement and high investor interest. This is complemented by a solid Growth score of 64.91, which reflects the company’s robust underlying business expansion.

However, the stock is considered to have very low Value, with a score of just 13.29, suggesting that it may be overvalued based on traditional financial metrics.

Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, ORCL shares are trading lower by 2.05% to $229.73 Wednesday morning. The stock has a 52-week high of $260.87 and a 52-week low of $118.86.

How To Buy ORCL Stock

By now you're likely curious about how to participate in the market for Oracle – be it to purchase shares, or even attempt to bet against the company.

Buying shares is typically done through a brokerage account. You can find a list of possible trading platforms here. Many will allow you to buy “fractional shares,” which allows you to own portions of stock without buying an entire share.

In the case of Oracle, which is trading at $231.26 as of publishing time, $100 would buy you 0.43 shares of stock.

If you're looking to bet against a company, the process is more complex. You'll need access to an options trading platform, or a broker who will allow you to “go short” a share of stock by lending you the shares to sell. The process of shorting a stock can be found at this resource. Otherwise, if your broker allows you to trade options, you can either buy a put option, or sell a call option at a strike price above where shares are currently trading – either way it allows you to profit off of the share price decline.

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