Oracle told investors this week that it is sitting on $664bn of work it has agreed to do and has not yet done.
Accountants call this remaining performance obligations, which is a dense way of saying that customers have signed contracts, the money is promised, and Oracle now has to go and build the thing they are paying for.
A year ago the same figure stood at $455bn, so in twelve months the pile of promises has grown by $209bn. The figures come from Oracle’s own results presentation for the first quarter of its 2027 financial year, reported by Investing.com.
Revenue for the three months came in at $19.3bn, up 30 percent, and profit per share beat what analysts had been expecting.
Turning a promise into a working data centre means buying land, steel, chips and an enormous amount of electricity, and Oracle is buying all of it faster than the cash is arriving.
