Oracle has been a key winner as investors have piled into artificial intelligence stocks. The company's shares have nearly tripled since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, but it's been on a particular tear over the past three months, with the stock gaining more than 90 since late April as the computing provider recorded surging revenues and inked key partnerships.
Oracle's shares rose 5.7 on Tuesday on news that the US government would allow chip makers including Nvidia and AMD to export some semiconductors to China, reversing Biden-era restrictions. That pushed Ellison, 80, ahead of Mark Zuckerberg on Bloomberg's wealth index. More than 80 of Ellison's wealth is in the form of Oracle stock and options.
In the past few months alone, Oracle has tallied tens of billions of dollars in cloud computing contracts and announced it's developing gigawatts of data centre power to serve enterprise clients including OpenAI, which rented a massive amount of additional capacity earlier this month as part of the companies' Stargate initiative with SoftBank Group.
Its revenue last quarter blew by estimates, with CEO Safra Catz saying that "FY26 will be even better".