There are few stocks that encapsulate the highs and lows of growth stock investing quite like Oracle (ORCL 2.00%).
Over the last year, Oracle has gone from a legacy software company turned Wall Street darling, to the poster child of high-risk, debt-fueled artificial intelligence (AI) spending.
Oracle is now down a staggering 54.9% from its all-time high (achieved last September). Here's why Oracle could still be a millionaire maker, and some risks to consider before buying the tech stock.
Image source: Getty Images.
Oracle's potential is undeniable
An essential quality of a long-term investor is patience, which allows an investment thesis to play out. But too much patience can teeter on complacency when dealing with a debt-heavy company like Oracle.
Oracle's database and data management software segment is high-margin and generates tons of free cash flow (FCF), but it's not big enough to fund Oracle's cloud infrastructure ambitions.
Oracle wants to expand the big three cloud players -- Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet -- into the big four, with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) being the premier cloud for high-performance computing and AI applications.
Oracle stock hit an all-time high last September after the company outlined an aggressive road map to grow OCI revenue from $18 billion in fiscal 2026 to $144 billion in fiscal 2030.
For context, Amazon Web Services -- which is the largest cloud infrastructure player in the world -- generated $128.7 billion in 2025 revenue. Meaning Oracle is projecting its cloud revenue less than five years from now to be larger than present-day AWS.
That's the millionaire-maker investment thesis for Oracle, in a nutshell. If that forecast is even remotely close to being true, and OCI generates similar margins to AWS (35.6% in 2025) -- then Oracle stock will likely produce massive returns for investors over the next five years, and potentially compound several-fold over the ultra long term. But the forecast is riddled with uncertainties.
NYSE: ORCL
Key Data Points
A race against the clock
Oracle's OCI projections are based on remaining performance obligations (RPO) -- which is basically another term for a backlog. Oracle reported $523 billion in RPO in its earnings results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, ended Nov. 30, 2025, but $300 billion of that is tied to OpenAI.
In the meantime, it is raising more money through a variety of debt and equity instruments -- further straining its balance sheet.
ORCL Net Total Long Term Debt (Quarterly) data by YCharts
Oracle is only a buy for risk-tolerant investors
Oracle is spending a fortune building data centers as quickly as possible to convert its backlog into realized revenue.
Investors looking for a safer way to bet big on cloud computing and AI should consider Microsoft or Amazon. Oracle's aggressive bet could play out and take significant market share from the current leaders, but it depends on a lot going right.
Because the company has so much debt, investors can't just sit idly by and hope that the gamble pays off.
Oracle will report third-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings in the coming weeks. A larger RPO number is unlikely to impress Wall Street, so investors should instead focus on Oracle's spending road map, FCF burn rate, and timeline for improving its balance sheet.
