By Daniel Howley

Oracle (ORCL) will report its fourth quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, amid recent AI trade fluctuations and as Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) set up their initial public offerings.

The cloud services and infrastructure provider counts OpenAI among its most important customers.

The Sam Altman-helmed AI startup signed a $300 billion, five-year deal with Oracle in 2025, which serves as the linchpin of its AI efforts.

For the fourth quarter, Oracle is expected to report earnings per share (EPS) of $1.97 on revenue of $19 billion, according to a Bloomberg analyst consensus. That would be an improvement from the $1.70 and $15.9 billion the company reported in the same period a year ago.

Oracle's broader Cloud business, which includes Cloud Applications and Cloud Infrastructure, is expected to reach $9.99 billion.

Oracle reports financial results Wednesday. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File). ASSOCIATED PRESS

Cloud Applications is anticipated to reach $4.16 billion in revenue, while Cloud Infrastructure is projected to come in at $5.17 billion, a whopping 90.8% year-over-year improvement.

Remaining performance obligations (RPOs), a measure of contracts the company has signed, but has yet to deliver on, is expected to reach $589.5 billion, up 327%.

RPOs provide investors with an understanding of overall demand for a company's cloud services, and have become increasingly important amid the global AI build-out.

Oracle stock took a stinging hit after announcing its second quarter earnings in December on a weak outlook and concerns related to its spending plans.

But the stock had been on the upswing, after beating Q3 expectations in March and raising 2027 revenue guidance to $90 billion.

Year to date, Oracle was up just 5.6%, as of Tuesday’s close. But the stock has climbed more than 16% over the last 12 months.

That's slightly better than Amazon (AMZN), which is up roughly 13% in the last 12 months, and far ahead of Microsoft (MSFT), which is down more than 14% in the last year.

Google (GOOG, GOOGL), however, has easily outperformed its peers thanks to improvements to its Gemini models and Google Cloud Platform growth, which have helped propel the stock nearly 104% over the past year.

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.

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