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.

Luke Kawa5h

GameStop jumps in after-hours trading after CEO Ryan Cohen purchases another 500,000 shares

Ryan Cohen is putting his money where his mouth is.

The GameStop CEO bought another 500,000 shares of company stock for $10.8 million on Wednesday, per a filing.

The stock was trading higher on Wednesday thanks to Cohen’s purchase of 500,000 shares for roughly $10.6 million on Tuesday, and extended these gains in the after-hours session on this news.

“The Reporting Person believes that it is essential for the Chief Executive Officer of any public company to purchase shares of such company in the open market with his or her own personal funds in order to further strengthen alignment with stockholders,” per the filing. “The Reporting Person believes that any Chief Executive Officer who fails to do so should be fired.”

Cohen is poised to become even more financially enmeshed with GameStop’s stock and operating performance should shareholders approve a package that would tie his pay completely to ambitious targets for the company’s earnings and market cap.

The CEO now owns about 8.56% of shares outstanding.

Luke Kawa6h

AppLovin tumbles; company dismisses negative report as “false, misleading, and nonsensical”

AppLovin managed to finish Tuesday well off its lows after initially getting clobbered in the wake of an incendiary report published by CapitalWatch.

Nonetheless, shares are getting torched on Wednesday, ending down nearly 6%. An AppLovin spokesperson forcefully denied the allegations made by CapitalWatch, which included calling the ad tech firm “the ultimate monument to 21st-century new-type transnational financial crime.”

Per an emailed statement:

“We categorically reject the claims made in this report, which is rife with false, misleading, and nonsensical allegations. AppLovin’s public filings transparently disclose our material investments, global operations, and information regarding significant shareholders.”

“Claims that AppLovin facilitated money laundering or its products are used for unauthorized downloads are patently false. AppLovin functions within a broader ecosystem that includes major app stores, operating systems, and payment providers, and the apps monetized through our platform must be publicly available on the major app stores and subject to their independent review and enforcement. Economically, the money laundering theory is implausible: publishers receive only a portion of advertiser spend, meaning any attempt to ‘launder’ funds would require forfeiting a substantial share while creating a highly visible, auditable transaction trail across multiple independent companies. Accepting the report’s premise would therefore imply a systemic failure across the broader mobile advertising and app-store ecosystem, for which the report provides no evidence.”

AppLovin craters after report from CapitalWatch alleges it’s a money-laundering operation for “transnational criminal kingpins”

Per an emailed statement:

“We categorically reject the claims made in this report, which is rife with false, misleading, and nonsensical allegations. AppLovin’s public filings transparently disclose our material investments, global operations, and information regarding significant shareholders.”

“Claims that AppLovin facilitated money laundering or its products are used for unauthorized downloads are patently false. AppLovin functions within a broader ecosystem that includes major app stores, operating systems, and payment providers, and the apps monetized through our platform must be publicly available on the major app stores and subject to their independent review and enforcement. Economically, the money laundering theory is implausible: publishers receive only a portion of advertiser spend, meaning any attempt to ‘launder’ funds would require forfeiting a substantial share while creating a highly visible, auditable transaction trail across multiple independent companies. Accepting the report’s premise would therefore imply a systemic failure across the broader mobile advertising and app-store ecosystem, for which the report provides no evidence.”

Tasha Matsumoto, Nate Becker

Stocks jump as Trump walks back European tariff threats

All sector ETFs traded higher in the broad-based rally.

Benny, the mascot for the Chicago Bulls, performs during a break between the Bulls and the New Orleans Pelicans at the United Center on January 14, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois.

Matt Phillips9h

Intel soars amid retail engagement, analyst chatter

Intel ripped toward a new 52-week high Wednesday, amid a flurry of activity in the options market and a couple of positive analyst assessments ahead of its earnings report due tomorrow.

Shortly after 11 a.m. ET, call options activity was roughly equivalent to the full-day average over the past 10 sessions. Bets on stock swings using call options have become a highly popular retail trade, suggesting that retail investors are getting interested in the shares ahead of the report from the partially nationalized American chip icon.

(That interpretation is buttressed by what we’re seeing on social sentiment-monitoring sites like SwaggyStocks, which at about 11:30 a.m. listed Intel as the fifth-most-mentioned stock on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum over the past 24 hours.)

Wall Street analysts are also chattering about the stock, with RBC and Bernstein Research both writing about it in the last 24 hours.

RBC — which has a “sector perform” (or neutral) rating on Intel — said it expects a “slight beat and largely inline outlook” when the company reports after the close Thursday.

Bernstein’s Intel watchers — who have a “market perform” (also neutral) rating on the stock — seemed a bit more cautious, writing, “Overall numbers going forward still looking high to us. Fundamentals and valuation keep us sidelined.”

“If there is no memory, there’s no AI.”

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

More Markets

GameStop jumps in after-hours trading after CEO Ryan Cohen purchases another 500,000 shares

AppLovin tumbles; company dismisses negative report as “false, misleading, and nonsensical”

AppLovin craters after report from CapitalWatch alleges it’s a money-laundering operation for “transnational criminal kingpins”

Intel soars amid retail engagement, analyst chatter

FLASH FORWARD

ByMattPhillips

WedJan 212026

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