Oracle projected cloud infrastructure sales will jump more than 70% in the fiscal year that began this month, boosting shares in late trading on investor enthusiasm for the closely watched business.

U.S.-listed shares of the company rose 14% in Thursday trading.

The company, long known for its database software, has been gaining traction in its effort to become a major player in the business of cloud computing — renting out computing power and storage — by targeting clients focused on artificial intelligence work. Earlier this year, it announced a joint venture dubbed Stargate to provide OpenAI with massive sums of computing power.

The race to develop and sell AI software and services has led to a frenzy of demand for data center capacity. Oracle has found a niche in renting out AI-focused computing power as traditional industry giants like Amazon.com Inc. have been stretched to the limit. It has inked customers including Elon Musk’s xAI and Meta Platforms Inc.

Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said in a statement Wednesday that Oracle is on its way to becoming “one of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure companies.” The past year “was a very good year, but we believe FY26 will be even better as our revenue growth rates will be dramatically higher,” she said.

The company said remaining performance obligations — watched as a measure of bookings — were $138 billion in the period that ended May 31, compared with $130 billion in the previous quarter.

“We recently got an order that said we’ll take all the capacity you have, wherever it is,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said on a call with analysts after the results were released. “This could be in Europe, it could be in Asia, we’ll just take everything. I mean, we never got an order like that before.”

The shares gained about 7% in extended trading after closing at $176.38 in New York. The stock has climbed 17% in the last month as investors have grown more optimistic that tariffs and other geopolitical issues won’t disrupt the software industry.

The most “exceptional” part of the report was Catz’s long-term outlook, which suggests revenue acceleration, Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. Bookings growth may come from work with OpenAI and Stargate, he said.

On the call, Oracle executives said the Stargate project is still in the early stages and not fully reflected in the financial outlook.

“If Stargate turns out to be everything as advertised, then we’ve understated our RPO growth,” Ellison said.

To win more cloud business, Oracle is spending money to build and equip data centers across the globe.

Oracle’s capital expenditures more than tripled to $21.2 billion for the year ended May 31. Establishing massive data centers such as Stargate’s first site in Abilene, Texas, is cash intensive. Those expenses will increase to about $25 billion this year, Catz said.

“The reason demand continues to outstrip supply is we can only build these data centers, build these computers, so fast,” Ellison said.

In the fiscal fourth quarter, sales increased 11% to $15.9 billion. Analysts, on average, projected $15.6 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit, excluding some items, was $1.70 a share, compared with the average estimate of $1.64.

Total cloud sales increased 27% to $6.7 billion, in line with estimates. Revenue from the cloud infrastructure unit expanded 52% to $3 billion, just falling short of Wall Street projections.

The slightly miss in quarterly cloud revenue was likely driven by supply constraints rather than a lack of demand, wrote Anurag Rana, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.

ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, a major customer of Oracle’s cloud, is in limbo in the US after a law passed requiring it to find an American buyer. President Donald Trump extended an initial April deadline to mid-June, and is eyeing another extension for the app to find a buyer, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Oracle inked another cloud contract with a Chinese tech company: e-commerce marketplace Temu, owned by PDD Holdings Inc. “They are basically moving their infrastructure to the Oracle cloud,” Ellison said on the call.