Oracle’s stock rose more than 3% on Thursday, moving ever closer to a $700 billion market cap

Oracle’s shares climbed on Thursday, putting it on pace to reach a $700 billion market-capitalization milestone.

Oracle Corp. is getting closer to achieving a feat accomplished by only 13 other U.S. companies.

With the cloud giant’s stock rising 3.1% on Thursday, Oracle is within a hair of surpassing a $700 billion market capitalization. Its shares clinched a new closing high of $248.75 at the end of the trading day; they need to close at $249.21 to reach the $700 billion mark, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Earlier in the day, Oracle’s shares traded as high as $251.60, setting an all-time intraday high, according to the data.

Oracle’s stock is up 19% in the past month and up 79% over the past year. The rally has added to the wealth of co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison, who on Wednesday regained the No. 2 spot among the wealthiest people in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — topping Meta Platforms Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. Ellison, Zuckerberg, and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos have all shuffled in and out of the No. 2 ranking in the past year, though they all lag well behind Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk.

Analysts have been optimistic about Oracle’s cloud-services revenue opportunities, with demand for artificial intelligence only growing. 

Cantor Fitzgerald analysts raised their price target to $271, from $216, in a Wednesday note to clients — noting that they’re boosting estimates after Oracle disclosed a deal in late June that it said would add more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in fiscal-year 2028. The analysts now expect that the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) business will make up 53% of revenue in fiscal 2029, versus their prior estimate of 50%.

The Cantor analysts said they’re now “slightly” ahead of the consensus view looking at fiscal years 2026 to 2029.

The analysts did not increase their estimates for Oracle’s Cloud Database Services (CDBS) as “a measure of conservatism,” and said that looking at the company’s core OCI business, excluding CDBS and after increasing their estimates, they still see growth slowing down from 87% in fiscal-year 2026 to 43% in fiscal-year 2029. 

Earlier this week, Evercore ISI analysts also raised their price target for Oracle to $270, from $215. With Oracle’s outlook for fiscal 2026 being “more upbeat than expected” and the $30 billion annual deal getting announced, they said Oracle has solidified its “spot as the ‘fourth’ global hyperscaler.”

“While Oracle’s massive AI deal is front and center right now in terms of its impact on FY28 growth, we think the longer-term bull case is broader,” the Evercore team wrote.

OCI’s share of the “multihundred-billion-dollar hyperscaler market” is growing, the analysts said, because of its opportunities with increasing AI workloads and current efforts by governments globally to build out data-center infrastructure for sovereign AI. 

The Evercore analysts also see potential upside for Oracle as headwinds from its data-cloud and Cerner healthcare-technology businesses subside.

Meanwhile, Oracle’s applications business is seeing double-digit growth, they added, while its database-maintenance customers are moving to the cloud.

“Clearly a lot of good news is already priced in, but we think Oracle is set to raise its long-term targets at its October analyst day — and not many other megacap tech names are showing this kind of revenue acceleration at scale,” the Evercore team said.