So, you know that whole AI thing everyone's talking about? It turns out it's pretty good for business if you're a cloud computing giant. Oracle Corp (ORCL) just reported its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026, and the numbers tell a clear story: the AI boom is filling Oracle's coffers.

The software behemoth posted revenue of $17.19 billion, comfortably beating the $16.91 billion analysts were expecting. Adjusted earnings came in at $1.79 per share, a 21% jump from a year ago and also ahead of the $1.71 per share estimate. In short, they beat on the top and bottom lines.

The real star of the show, however, was the cloud. Total cloud revenue climbed 44% year-over-year to $8.9 billion. But let's dig into that a bit, because the growth isn't uniform. The engine of this growth is Cloud Infrastructure, which saw revenue skyrocket 84% to $4.9 billion. That's the part of the business where companies rent computing power and storage—exactly the kind of stuff you need to train and run massive AI models.

Here’s a quick breakdown of where the cloud money came from:

• Cloud Infrastructure: $4.9 billion, up 84%
• Cloud Applications: $4 billion, up 13%
• Fusion Cloud ERP: $1.1 billion, up 17%
• NetSuite Cloud ERP: $1.1 billion, up 14%

Meanwhile, the more traditional software revenue grew a modest 3%. The story here is a company rapidly transforming its revenue base toward the cloud.

But perhaps the most eye-popping number wasn't on the income statement. It's a line item called "remaining performance obligations" (RPO), which is basically a measure of all the contracted future revenue that hasn't been recognized yet. Oracle's RPO stood at a staggering $553 billion at the end of the quarter. That's up 325% from a year ago. To put it simply, Oracle has an absolutely massive pipeline of guaranteed future sales. The company also finished the quarter with about $38.46 billion in cash.

Looking ahead, Oracle expects the party to continue. For the current fourth quarter, they see revenue growing 18% to 20% year-over-year, with cloud revenue up 44% to 48%. They expect adjusted earnings per share between $1.96 and $2.00, compared to an estimate of $1.95.

The longer-term view is even more optimistic. While maintaining its fiscal 2026 revenue target of $67 billion, Oracle guided for fiscal 2027 revenue of $90 billion. That's notably higher than the $86.63 billion analysts had penciled in.

Why so confident? The company spelled it out. "The demand for cloud computing for AI training and inferencing continues to grow faster than supply," they said in their release. They added that some of their biggest AI cloud customers have "recently strengthened their financial positions quite substantially." Translation: The customers who need massive AI compute power have the money to pay for it, and Oracle can't build data centers fast enough to meet the demand. This dynamic, they say, will allow them to "comfortably meet and likely exceed" their growth forecasts.

In a move to return some cash to shareholders, Oracle's board declared a quarterly cash dividend of 50 cents per share, payable on April 24 to shareholders of record as of April 9.

Investors liked what they heard. After the market closed, Oracle shares were up over 7%, trading around $160.24. The market is betting that Oracle's AI-fueled cloud growth story has legs well into the future.