Oracle shares rocketed 36% higher Wednesday — their best day since 1992, adding roughly $244 billion in market value — after the database giant reported a staggering $455 billion in remaining performance obligations — backlog of contracted revenue — up 359% from a year ago, driven by a handful of enormous cloud contracts tied to the AI buildout.

The company’s fiscal first-quarter results narrowly missed Wall Street estimates, with adjusted earnings per share of $1.47 on $14.93 billion in revenue versus the $1.48 and $15.04 billion analysts expected. But investors fixed on the forward-looking backlog, which CEO Safra Catz said included four multibillion-dollar agreements with three customers. Press reports tie one of those to OpenAI, which had disclosed a deal with Oracle to develop 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity. OpenAI said it signed an agreement with Oracle to develop 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity. The rally briefly made co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison the world’s richest person, passing Elon Musk on Bloomberg’s billionaires index. Oracle projected cloud infrastructure revenue will hit $18 billion this fiscal year, up from about $10 billion, and balloon to $144 billion by fiscal 2030. Catz told analysts the company will spend roughly $35 billion in capital expenditures this year, up 65%.

The rally reignites the AI-bubble debate: is this a landmark validation of the data-center buildout, or a warning sign of frothy expectations? Oracle’s guidance implies it will capture a share of AI cloud spend that even some bulls — like Evercore’s Kirk Materne, who had modeled $108 billion for fiscal 2029 — hadn’t anticipated. The answer may determine whether today’s rally is a signal of enduring value or a peak in the cycle.