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Analysts revise up anything and everything they thought about Oracle

After the company’s bombshell earnings this week, Wall Street thinks Oracle’s trajectory has changed.

9/12/25 1:45PM

As the week’s trading comes to a close, Oracle’s earnings bombshell continues to be digested by Wall Street, with analysts writing up a range of estimates for the company over the coming years.

Over the last day alone, JPMorgan equity analysts upped their price target for the stock, lifting it to $270 from a relatively low $210. (That’s still a pretty big undershoot of the current consensus of nearly $330, which implies a nearly 13% gain for the stock over the next 12 to 18 months.)

Analysts at Bernstein Research, on the other hand, lifted their price target on the stock to $363 from $308, citing an “exceptional growth trajectory” for the company’s cloud business. And Barclays analysts upgraded their target to $347 from $281.

“We still sense that many investors are not fully aligned with the notion that Oracle will be a main AI beneficiary and hence, expect ongoing upside momentum for the name,” Barclays analysts wrote.

But from the looks of rising estimates across a number of metrics, Oracle has made considerable progress this week in changing its image among the investing public from an incredibly profitable — but dull as dishwater — cloud computing and business software behemoth to a major player in the AI revolution.

Following on the massive build in the company’s key RPO metric — essentially booked orders that haven’t yet turned into actual sales dollars — disclosed during the company’s results, analysts have ratcheted up their estimates of sales growth over the coming years.

They now see annual sales returning to the remarkable level of more than 40% by fiscal 2028. (It has been almost 30 years since Oracle sales growth cracked 40%, which it did in fiscal 1996.)

Earnings per share are also expected to notch records over the next three fiscal years as well, with year-over-year growth climbing to 13%, 18%, and 36% by fiscal 2028.

To be sure, it should be stressed that these are, after all, estimates — statistical expressions of the conventional wisdom on Wall Street.

That conventional wisdom could be on the money. Or untidy elements of reality could intervene and make this story a lot messier.

For instance, in order to collect its many billions in backlogged RPO sales the company announced this week, Oracle will have to invest billions and billions of dollars to build out the data infrastructure it needs to provide services to customers like OpenAI.

And in the near term, that’s going to eat up a flood of sales dollars coming through the door, something that Wall Street estimates also captured this week.

In Oracle’s post-earnings conference call with analysts, company CEO Safra Catz explained elegantly how interrelated the company’s capital expenditure plans are with its RPO order backlog:

“Given our RPO growth, I now expect fiscal year 2026 CapEx will be around $35 billion. As a reminder, the vast majority of our CapEx investments are for revenue-generating equipment that is going into the data centers and not from land or buildings. As we bring more capacity online, we will convert the large RPO backlog into accelerating revenue and profit growth.”

Sounds like a good plan. And judging by the share price move this week and the follow-on upgrades to Wall Street price targets and earnings and sales estimates, people think it’s likely to work.

But the history of massive investment booms — from the emergence of railroads, to Japanese real estate, to the dot-com boom and the US housing bust — suggests there is plenty of scope for these things not to go exactly as everybody expects. But for now, the party continues.

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Plug Power jumps amid surge in call activity as CEO Andy Marsh hosts AMA

Plug Power surged on Thursday, jumping nearly 17% amid elevated call activity as outgoing CEO Andy Marsh hosted an “ask me anything” on the r/PlugPowerStock subreddit.

As many as 192,581 call options changed hands, more than 4x the 20-day average — call options with a strike price of $4 that expire in mid-June were the most active contract.

Marsh’s appearance was aimed at building support for the board’s recommendations that its investors vote in favor of three proposals at a special meeting of shareholders slated for next week. These proposals include: allowing votes to be decided by a majority of voters rather than a majority of shareholders, enabling an increase in the company’s share count, and a third measure to delay this special meeting in the event that there aren’t enough votes for either of those two proposals to pass.

During the session, Marsh made the following points:

Management really doesn’t want to have to do a reverse stock split, but would feel forced to do so if the second proposal fails to pass. Per a recent filing from Plug, “Without additional authorized shares, the Company will not be able to: meet its contractual obligations to increase authorized shares of common stock by February 28, 2026; raise capital necessary for operations and growth; and execute on its business plans and strategy.”
Plug plans to lean even more into opportunities to offer power to AI data center customers, with Marsh writing that incoming CEO Jose Luis Crespo will offer more details on this in a follow-up AMA scheduled for March.

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Meta shares rally as Jefferies says it’s a bargain relative to Mag 7 peers

Shares of Meta rallied over 5% on Thursday, as Jefferies analyst Brent Thill doubled down on his “buy” rating for the company, calling the stock a relative bargain compared to its Magnificent 7 peers. The analyst set a price target of $910, well above the $645 where the stock is trading today.

News out of the World Economic Forum this week that Meta’s first models from its revamped AI teams are “very good” aligns with Thill’s argument that the company is well positioned to get back in the AI race with the “all-star model,” which is expected to be released in the first half of the year.

Recent cuts to Meta’s Reality Labs also signal that the company is focusing its spending where it matters. The Jefferies note added that the recent monetization of Threads via ads will help boost revenue.

Next week, Meta reports its fourth-quarter earnings, and Thill expects that even if the company raises its 2026 capital expenditure outlook, investors won’t be spooked, as the company has been clear that spending may continue to be high.

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Arista Networks rips higher amid jump in call buying

Arista Networks, a maker of switches and other networking equipment used in AI data centers, was on track for its best day of the new year on Thursday as options traders went bullish on the stock.

As of around 11 a.m. ET, there was nearly twice as much call buying in Arista than its 10-day moving average for a full day of activity. Buying call options to make leveraged bets on price increases has been a favorite trading tactic of retail traders in recent years.

Otherwise, there weren’t clear headlines tied to today’s outsized move, but the stock has been getting attention lately: in a note published earlier this month, Goldman Sachs analysts spotlighted Arista as a top tactical trade for earnings season, saying the shares — which they rate a “buy” — could rise 20% over the next year.

“ANET is well positioned amidst ongoing data center spending growth, where its position as a best of breed provider of networking equipment should advantage the company, particularly as data center networks become increasingly complex,” Goldman analysts wrote in the January 8 report.

And recent reports also say Microsoft — which accounted for 20% of Arista’s revenue in 2024, according to Goldman Sachs — is planning a massive expansion of its Wisconsin data center project.

Arista stock did get a lift following the release of solid US economic numbers at 8:30 a.m. that seemed fairly specific to Arista itself. (There was no similar bounce from competitors like Cisco or Hewlett-Packard.)

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