Oracle secures billions from AI customers for data center expansion

Oracle has figured out a neat trick for building one of the largest data center networks on the planet: get the customers to pay for it upfront. In its fiscal first quarter ending August 31, 2026, the company collected $11.36 billion in customer prepayments, a sum that covered a significant chunk of its $28.5 billion in capital expenditures for the period. The arrangement is working. Cloud infrastructure revenue more than doubled year-over-year, climbing 121% to $7.4 billion. Total cloud revenue hit $11.6 billion, a 62% increase. And the pipeline keeps growing, with Oracle booking over $30 billion in new AI cloud contracts during the quarter alone. The prepay playbook Oracle’s remaining performance obligations, essentially its backlog of contracted future revenue, surged to $664 billion. That figure represents an extraordinary runway of committed spending from customers who have already signed on the dotted line. The company delivered 850 megawatts of new data center capacity during the quarter and supplied more than 300,000 GPUs to AI clients. Its GPU utilization rate hit 97.9%, meaning almost every chip Oracle has deployed is actively running workloads. Who’s writing the checks T...