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 2:48PM

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.

Matt Phillips4h

Enphase drops as guidance and results fail to impress investors

Enphase Energy fell in after-hours trading Tuesday as uninspiring Q2 guidance overshadowed better-than-expected numbers in its Q1 earnings report. The maker of solar power and battery equipment reported:

Sales of $282.9 million vs. the $282.3 million FactSet expectation.
Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.47 vs. the $0.43 consensus estimate.
Q2 guidance for revenue between $280 million and $310 million ($295 million at the midpoint) vs. the $294.9 million forecast.

Enphase was a sometimes popular retail trade of the Covid era, when federal tax credits and low interest rates led to a burst of activity for rooftop solar installation. Between the end of 2019 and 2022, the shares rose more than 1,000%.

But as interest rates rose — driven, in part, by both Fed hikes and worries the increases wouldn’t be enough to quell price growth — and Republicans stripped out key tax credits and subsidies for the solar sector from the federal budget, the shares tanked. They’ve lost nearly 90% of their value since peaking in December 2022, and have emerged as a favorite of short sellers. Roughly 20% of the company’s public float is now in the hands of bearish traders.

Matt Phillips4h

Bloom Energy surges after reporting huge Q1 revenue beat, big guidance hike

Fuel cell maker and momentum trading favorite Bloom Energy surged late Tuesday after reporting Q1 earnings and revenue that trounced Wall Street expectations while ratcheting guidance higher. Here are the numbers:

Q1 adjusted earnings per share of $0.44 vs. the $0.12 expected by analysts, according to FactSet.
Revenue of $751.1 million vs. the $539.9 million consensus forecast.
Full-year EPS guidance of between $1.85 and $2.25 vs. previous guidance of between $1.33 and $1.48 and Wall Street expectations for $1.42.

Bloom Energy shares have been ripping in 2026. They’ve doubled this year, and were up sharply in April after the company announced that it was expanding a deal to supply its fuel cells to Oracle’s data centers. (Oracle also received warrants in April to buy Bloom stock as part of a previous deal.)

The rise of the stock — it’s up more than 1,200% over the last 12 months — has been driven by a simultaneous rise in market sentiment and expectations for business results. Analysts have lifted their full-year 2026 earnings expectations for Bloom by about 30% since the start of the year.

But even accounting for those improving fundamentals, the stock is still quite highly priced by conventional metrics, trading at a multiple of almost 120x earnings over the next 12 months and about 17x expected sales.

Matt Phillips4h

Seagate soars on strong quarterly numbers, guidance far above expectations

Seagate Technology Holdings ripped late Tuesday after the maker of hard disk drives, relatively cheap data storage devices, reported better-than-expected quarterly numbers and guidance in its earnings report. Seagate reported:

Revenue of $3.11 billion vs. the $2.96 billion expectation from Wall Street analysts, per FactSet.
Adjusted earnings per share of $4.10 vs. the $3.51 anticipated on the Street.
EPS guidance of between $4.80 and $5.20 (midpoint $5.00) for the current quarter — which ends in June — vs. the $3.99 expectation.
Sales guidance of between $3.35 billion and $3.55 billion ($3.45 midpoint) for the current quarter vs. Wall Street’s expectation for $3.16 billion.

The sudden explosion of Seagate shares — and those of its disk-making rival, Western Digital — has been one of the more surprising outgrowths of the AI boom.

A little over a year ago, on April 8, 2025, Seagate shares had been essentially flat for over a decade. (They ended that day up 0.1% since the end of 2014.) Since then, they’re up roughly 800%, as the reality of seemingly endless AI-related demand for data storage has become plain.

Perhaps most impressive is that the pace of the gains is quickening. If the after-hours gains hold, Seagate is on track for April to be its the best month since October 2011.

Luke Kawa

Robinhood sinks after Q1 results trail estimates

The brokerage just reported quarterly results.