Oracle shares ripped 11% to close at $144.34 on the Nasdaq, marking the steepest single-day gain since late May. The rally came after Chief Financial Officer Hilary Maxson told investors at the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas that free cash flow is projected to hit $30 billion in the fiscal year ending May 2029. It’s a stark pivot from the fiscal year that just closed, where Oracle recorded a negative $23.7 billion in free cash flow due to heavy data center spending.
The move addressed the primary anxiety plaguing Wall Street: the return on investment for Oracle’s massive AI infrastructure build-out. Investors had watched the stock bleed 33% year-to-date through Tuesday, worried that the capital expenditure required to service clients like OpenAI would keep the cash engine running in the red. By projecting a return to positive territory and specifying that supplementary capital requirements will be constrained to $20 billion through May 2030, Maxson aimed to cap the downside risk.
The cash will come from a mix of equity and debt, according to the disclosure. Oracle also reiterated its aggressive revenue guidance of $225 billion for the fiscal year ending in May 2030. The company plans to deploy an additional seven gigawatts of data center capacity, pushing total infrastructure beyond 10 gigawatts by the end of fiscal 2028. For context, one gigawatt can power roughly 750,000 US homes, so Oracle is essentially building a grid-scale power plant dedicated to compute.
The capital intensity is expected to peak in the current and next fiscal years before declining in FY 2029, Maxson noted. This timeline aligns with the company’s strategic shift from a traditional database software vendor to a core provider of AI computational infrastructure. As the first major tech firm to post negative free cash flow from such investments, Oracle’s recovery trajectory will be a key benchmark for the broader AI infrastructure sector.