Oracle is on an all-time roll — and the prophecy written in its stock price is that founder Larry Ellison may become the wealthiest man on the face of the planet.

The company reported its latest earnings results after the bell on Tuesday, including an astounding projection that revenue from its cloud computing will increase 77% to $18 billion this year and could rise as high as $144 billion annually by 2030, thanks in large part to four multibillion-dollar deals with three different customers. By Wednesday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported on one of those marquee deals: a five-year, $300 billion agreement to supply cloud computing power to OpenAI.

Picks and Shovels

Oracle said its remaining performance obligations (RPOs), the contracted revenue that has not yet been realized, such as the OpenAI deal that the WSJ reported will begin in 2027, are now sitting at $455 billion. That’s up 359% from just a year ago, inspiring quite literal words of awe from Wall Street analysts during the company’s earnings call: Guggenheim’s John DiFucci said he was “blown away,” while Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, “We’re all kind of in shock, in a very good way.”

In other words, Oracle has become a favorite supplier of picks and shovels amid the artificial intelligence gold rush. And CEO Safra Catz says that’s because it’s different from cloud computing rivals such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon: “Some of our competitors, they like to own buildings … That’s not really our specialty. Our specialty is the unique technology, the unique networking, the storage — just the whole way we put these systems together.”

More importantly, Oracle’s RPO figure is an indication that the AI industry is preparing to spend big to keep the gold rush from going bust anytime soon:

• In a June filing, OpenAI revealed it was on track to generate just $10 billion in revenue this year, leagues away from the roughly $60 billion it will be paying Oracle under the deal. Meanwhile, sources told the WSJ earlier this year that OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently informed investors the company won’t be profitable until 2029 (and it’s still sorting out its for-profit structure).
• Oracle is similarly putting growth over profit; the company’s debt-to-equity ratio has soared to 427%, with S&P data showing its $21 billion in operating cash flow in the 12 months through August was eclipsed by its $27 billion in capital expenditures.

Margin Call: The AI moment has not only been very good to picks-and-shovels companies like Oracle but also to financiers on Wall Street funding the massive debt splurge. Not everyone is drooling, though. In a note published Wednesday seen by MarketWatch, D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria flagged that “at best,” Oracle is running its AI cloud compute services “at single-digit operating margins, if not serving compute at a loss in some instances,” a far cry from the 50% margins of its legacy business. All the same, Oracle’s share price leaped 36% by the close of trading Wednesday, and was sufficiently high during much of the trading day that Ellison’s fortune briefly eclipsed that of Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg. Oracle’s was the only single-day gain greater than 25% for a company worth at least half a trillion dollars, according to Dow Jones data. ​​It’s also good for the company’s best single-day stock performance since 1999 … or right before a certain early digital age bubble started to burst.

Chewy’s not rolling over, despite its stock falling nearly 20% after the online pet retailer reported earnings. The Amazon-for-pets met analysts’ expectations in the second quarter and raised its sales guidance for the year, but it also warned that it plans to give up some profit to invest in its long-term success. Its stock is still up for the year.

As pet parents spend more than ever on their fur babies, pet retailers are cashing in on the puppy love.

Barking Up The Right Tree

More than 94 million US households own a pet, the American Pet Products Association found, and Americans are expected to spend $157 billion on their little Lunas and Rexes this year. That total has been climbing every year since 2018.

And it seems a massive chunk of these animal owners are Chewy regulars:

• Chewy was a pandemic winner as locked-down and lonely people adopted animals to keep them company. Its revenue popped 47% in 2020, and it has kept growing since, albeit at a slower pace.
• Now, Chewy has more than 21 million pawrents on its platform after adding 150,000 net customers last quarter. Those shoppers spent $591 annually, on average, nearly $30 more than they did a year ago. Chewy attributes its growth to its paid membership program, Chewy+, and its autoship service (which can be set to, for instance, auto-ship Greenies monthly) — which makes up 83% of sales.

Dog Years: It’s been about 35 years since the pandemic … if you’re a dog. The pet industry was boosted early in the pandemic when new pet owners splurged on their initial set-ups (crates, beds, leashes). Now, pet retailers are looking ahead to cater to an aging animal population. Chewy is the No. 1 online pet pharmacy and started opening in-person vet clinics last year. Rival pet retailer Petco Health + Wellness has also focused on pharmacies, revamping its stores as part of a wider turnaround plan. It’s a lucrative area to cash in on: The cost of services like vet care and grooming has gone up 42% since 2019, nearly double the price increase of food and treats, Bank of America found. Unfortunately, the high prices may also be contributing to pet surrenders to shelters.

The Trump administration has reportedly contemplated a significant crackdown on medical treatments imported from China.

At the heart of the deliberations, the New York Times reported Wednesday, is an already-drafted executive order that would target the crucial pipeline of experimental treatments being developed in the Middle Kingdom, where US pharma giants have increasingly pledged to invest tens of billions of dollars to license drugs in lieu of deals with American biotechs. The White House said it is not “actively considering” the order, but the issue is very much front of mind for investors and industry.

Reforms Set to Light Speed

China’s pharmaceutical sector, a minor player just years ago, revved up into a global juggernaut faster than a Fuxing high-speed train. It started with the country overhauling its drug regulator in the 2010s to more closely align with the US Food and Drug Administration, bringing the requirements that drug manufacturers must meet on both sides of the Pacific closer together and making it easier to develop treatments for export to the US and EU. Then, an advanced transformation began in 2015, when Beijing launched a $300 billion decade-long Made in China industrial policy that targeted sectors including biopharmaceuticals for rapid expansion.

As with its rising AI prowess and growing military, China’s subsequent pharmaceutical advances have led to concerns that it is catching up to the US. In April, an independent commission warned Washington lawmakers in its final report that China has already lapped the US in some areas of biotechnology and the life sciences. The fact that developing drugs in China is cheaper and, with regulatory changes, is becoming faster, has made it a juggernaut hub for research and investment:

• Jefferies analysts estimate that roughly a third of all global pharmaceutical licensing spending in the first half of 2025, or $52 billion, involved Chinese drugs. In both 2023 and 2024, China represented 21% of licensing spending and, in years before that, only single digits.
• The money has poured in along with handshakes: Jefferies said Chinese biopharmaceutical firms struck 125 business-development deals with external partners last year, almost doubling the 65 in 2020. Notable this year has been a surge in agreements to license cancer treatments.

Tug of War: The Times reported that figures including billionaire investor Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have lobbied the Trump administration to consider restricting Chinese biotechnology over fears their own hard-to-sell positions in US companies are under duress. Major drugmakers, which have partnered with Chinese companies over US firms, have been advocating against the measures, the paper said. A research paper published in the scientific journal Nature last week found that 11 pharma giants, among them AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and GSK, have together pledged roughly $150 billion to license novel treatments from China in the last five years.