Why Oracle Fell Hard Today

Shares of database and cloud giant Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) plunged as much as 8.1% on Friday, before recovering slightly to a 6.9% decline on the day.

Oracle held an analyst-attended Investor Day presentation yesterday, where the company clarified some of its long-term targets. While the guidance to 2030 was fairly impressive, it appears investors are "selling the news" after the stock's tremendous gains over the past couple of months.

Oracle lives up to some of the hype, but investors wanted more

In the presentation, Oracle gave some more detail around its cloud infrastructure growth and margins out over the long term. Oracle's cloud growth has been a subject of some debate, especially after the company announced a massive 359% growth in its cloud RPO in September to $455 billion, with the majority of that growth coming from a single contract with OpenAI.

Some were skeptical about that projection, as well as the margins on the project, given the huge customer concentration around OpenAI, with one analyst noting that Oracle was only making a 14% gross margin on its cloud infrastructure services today.

However, Oracle disclosed yesterday that it predicts between 30% and 40% gross margin on its large cloud infrastructure deals, which is higher than what was feared. Moreover, Oracle projected a whopping $225 billion in revenue by 2030, as well as $21 per share in earnings. Of that revenue, management expects about $166 billion to come from Oracle's cloud infrastructure unit by that time.

Those targets were actually above the analyst consensus heading into the day. And yet, the stock still sold off on that news. After today's plunge, Oracle's stock trades around $291 per share, or 13.9 times that 2030 earnings figure.

That seems strikingly cheap, but investors should remember that it's only 2025, and there is a time value of money to account for when valuing a stock through the discounted cash flow method.

Moreover, a 30% to 40% gross margin on the cloud operations may still be disappointing to some, given that leader Amazon Web Services has already achieved a 36.8% operating margin -- not gross margin, but operating margin -- over the past 12 months.

Image source: Getty Images.

Oracle made its big AI play, and investors are divided

It should be noted that while investors are selling the news today, analysts are actually raising their Oracle price targets, with sell-side analysts at Guggenheim and T.D. Cowen both raising their price targets to $400, up from $375, after the event.

Oracle has made its AI gambit by partnering with OpenAI, betting big on the success of the current industry leader. OpenAI has committed to hundreds of billions in cloud contracts, even though it's currently losing money, having made a reported $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025 and burning through $2.5 billion in cash.

So, Oracle's anticipated growth may carry more risk than the typical cloud giant, and it appears investors took some of that risk off the table on Friday.

Billy Duberstein and/or his clients have positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Oracle. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.