($) Oracle Cloud: the Largest "Chinese Cloud" in America?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or Overseas Chinese Infrastructure?
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Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, became the 2nd richest person in the world last week, after Oracle announced its Q4 2025 earnings. Its stock price jumped more than 20% in the subsequent two days, propelling Ellison past Bezos and Zuck to the number two spot, trailing only Elon Musk.
What made an already-wealthy Ellison even wealthier was Oracle’s bullish forecast of its cloud computing unit growing rapidly in the next year due to more AI infrastructure build out. The company is now expecting a 100% jump in RPO or remaining performance obligation, a SaaS accounting jargon for signed contracts of services that have not been delivered yet. In other words, future revenue that is already under contract. And this expectation does not include Stargate, which is still lacking details.
But another source of real revenue from an unlikely customer received much less attention, even though Ellison voluntarily and effusively talked about it during the earnings call:
“Let me surprise you with -- there are huge contracts that have nothing to do with even AI. We got a gigantic contract from Temu that would have been unprecedented, except for all the other gigantic contracts we've also been getting. But Temu is a very large company that's growing extremely rapidly. And they are basically moving their infrastructure to the Oracle Cloud.”
Yes, Temu, the infamous Pinduoduo e-commerce subsidiary, whose Superbowl ads captured the zeitgeist of American consumers, while its Chinese roots continue to irk the sensitivity of DC China hawks.
As most American businesses and investors continue their multi-year effort of distancing themselves from anything that has to do with China, Oracle has been strategically cornering the purse strings of companies with a “China problem” and clearly with great success. So much so that someone on X quipped if OCI, the acronym for Oracle’s cloud platform, stands for “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” or “Overseas Chinese Infrastructure”?
OCI’s most famous Chinese customer is of course TikTok. Temu is just the newest. But this trend began long before either Temu or TikTok. It started with Zoom.