Oracle’s RPO Remaining Performance Obligations

RPOs generated some RPMs (Gabriele Lanzo/Getty Images)

What is an RPO, the number that drove Oracle’s giant share move?

9/10/25 1:48PM

Oracle might have just posted the most lucrative earnings miss in market history.

Lost in the roughly $275 billion market move that came after the results is the fact that the cloud computing and business software giant actually posted slightly disappointing results on the top and bottom lines. (Earnings per share of $1.47 missed by a penny, and sales of $14.93 billion were short of the $15.04 billion Wall Street had forecast.)

But nobody cared.

That’s because the company announced a different gobsmacking result: a 359% surge to $455 billion of a closely followed measure of the company’s “booked” revenue, known as “remaining performance obligations,” or RPO.

The company was not shy about highlighting this figure, slapping it at the top line of its earnings announcement press release.

“We signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in Q1,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said. “This resulted in RPO contract backlog increasing 359% to $455 billion. It was an astonishing quarter — and demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure continues to build.”

But what the heck, exactly, is RPO?

Essentially, it’s booked revenue — legally binding IOUs that reflect sales Oracle expects to go through. Per Oracle’s June report, RPO reflects “deferred revenues; invoices that have been issued to customers but were uncollected and have not been recognized as revenues; and amounts that will be invoiced and recognized as revenues in future periods.”

Given the degree to which demand for Oracle’s cloud services outstrips supply, the company signs deals to provide major AI players with computing power. In June, Oracle announced a $30 billion annual contract it signed with a then undisclosed customer that was later revealed to be OpenAI. Oracle won’t actually see that revenue until fiscal year 2028, so it’s reported as RPO.

Most of Oracle’s RPO won’t turn into real revenue for quite a bit. In its annual report in June, Oracle said two-thirds of its then $137.8 billion RPO wouldn’t be recognized as revenue for at least 12 months.

Seemingly the most important new customer is OpenAI, per The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on a $300 billion deal between the two parties. The agreement will require 4.5 gigawatts of capacity, equivalent to more than twice the power produced by the Hoover Dam.

Oracle has to build out its infrastructure to meet that contracted demand, and that race is reflected in the hefty $35 billion in capital spending it expects for this fiscal year.

According to Catz in the company’s earnings call, Oracle “signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and many others.” Catz said she expects Oracle’s RPO to grow to more than $500 billion in the fiscal year as the company signs more multibillion-dollar cloud deals.

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Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

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Intel sinks on news it will hang on to networking unit

Intel dropped in early trading Thursday after it disclosed plans to retain ownership of its networking unit following a strategic review of operations.

The unit, known as NEX, makes products like infrastructure processors, which do needed “housekeeping” tasks like running security checks, thereby freeing core Intel CPUs to do the higher-value operations. It also produces switches and controllers that manage and direct the flow of data to CPUs.

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Quantum computing stocks soar on return of bullish options bets

The calendar says December, but the price action is starting to look a lot more like September to me:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are all up at least 7% as of 11:04 a.m. ET, buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.

Nearly 50,000 calls in IonQ have already changed hands, well above the 20-day average for a full session, with activity concentrated in strikes from $50 to $55 in contracts that expire between Friday and mid-January. Its put/call ratio is near 0.2, versus an average of over 1 for the past 20 sessions.
More than 65,000 calls have traded in Rigetti, a hair shy of its full 20-day average. Like IonQ, options activity has a bullish tilt, with a put/call ratio of about 0.7 versus a 20-day average of roughly 1.2.
D-Wave, which received positive commentary from Evercore ISI on Wednesday, isn’t seeing call activity as elevated as its peers, but the options action is also very skewed toward the bull side, with a put/call ratio of less than 0.3 versus a 20-session average of 0.7.

Pure-play quantum computing stocks nearly doubled from late August to late September amid heavy options market activity thanks to reports on government support for the sector, M&A activity, tech breakthroughs, and a flurry of price target hikes by Wall Street.

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