Oracle (ORCL) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Oracle (ORCL 1.52%)
Q3 2024 Earnings Call
Mar 11, 2024, 5:00 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Krista and I’ll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Oracle Corporation third quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise.

After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ken Bond, senior vice president, investor relations. Mr.

Bond, you may begin your conference.

Ken Bond — Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, Krista. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Oracle’s third-quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call. A copy of the press release and financial tables, which includes a GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation and other supplemental financial information can be viewed and downloaded from our Investor Relations website. Additionally, a list of many customers who purchase Oracle Cloud Services or went live on Oracle Cloud recently will be available from our Investor Relations website.

On the call today are Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison and Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz. As a reminder, today’s discussion will include forward-looking statements including predictions, expectations, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. Throughout today’s discussion, we will provide some important factors relating to our business, which may potentially affect these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from statements being made today.

As a result, we caution you against placing undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, and we encourage you to review our most recent reports including our 10-K and 10-Q and any applicable amendments for a complete discussion of these factors and other risks which may affect our future results or the market price of our stock. And finally, we are not obligating ourselves to revise our results or these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Before taking questions, we’ll begin with a few prepared remarks. And with that, I’d like to turn the call over to Safra.

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Ken, and good afternoon, everyone. We had another excellent quarter with third-quarter revenue coming in as expected and EPS $0.02 above the high end of my guidance range. Now, before I get into the results of the quarter, I wanted to touch on the strength of our infrastructure cloud business. OCI has emerged as the largest driver of our overall revenue acceleration, growing much much faster than our cloud competitors. Customers have figured out that by moving to OCI, they can really get more while paying less, but it’s not just the cost that matters to our customers.

Beyond the superior price performance of OCI, customers are choosing Oracle and Oracle services for multiple reasons. First, we know better than anyone what it takes to run the full stack of technology that goes into mission-critical workloads. I’m talking about running at enterprise scale with comprehensive security and unparalleled support, and that’s from decades of experience running the world’s most important workloads and optimizing clustering technology, which is critical to artificial intelligence workloads and database services. Secondly, our AI capabilities are unique as they’re built in to help customers drive business outcomes. This is more than integrating generative AI across our fusion and industry cloud applications and autonomous database, which we have done. It’s also about enabling and refining these AME AI models with the customer’s own data to better understand and serve their operations without them losing control of their own data. Third, we provide deployment flexibility for customers based on how they want to run in the cloud.

In addition to offering public cloud services, we remain the only vendor which also offers a dedicated and complete cloud of customer-dedicated regions, sovereign clouds, and Alloy, our partner cloud. so customers don’t have to compromise the services they receive while meeting their deployment needs. And finally, we provide multi-cloud offerings so customers can consume our cloud services in the public cloud of their choice. We offer Oracle Database at Azure with Microsoft, as well as MySQL Heatwave through multiple clouds. And you can expect more multi-cloud services to come.

Now to Q3 results, which I’d like to point out I had the actual results on day five and signed off with my auditors days ago, so I’m just bragging a little bit, but I couldn’t help it. I know a lot of CFOs are pretty jealous. As I mentioned earlier, total revenue came in at the midpoint of my constant-currency guidance and EPS was above the high end of guidance. As was the case when I gave guidance last quarter, currency had little effect in Q3, but I’ll still discuss our results using constant-currency growth rates in the few areas that the rates are slightly different.

So, here we go. Cloud revenue, that’s SaaS and IaaS, excluding Cerner, was 4.4 billion, up 26%. Including Cerner, total cloud revenue was up 24% at 5.1 billion, with IaaS revenue of 1.8 billion up 49%, and SaaS revenue of 3.3 billion up 14%. This quarter marks the first time our total cloud revenue is more than our total license support revenue. So, we have crossed over.

Total cloud services and license support revenue for the quarter was 10 billion, up 11%, driven again by our strategic cloud applications, autonomous database, and OCI. Application subscription revenues, which includes product support, were 4.6 billion and up 10%. Our strategic back-office SaaS applications now have annualized revenue of 7.4 billion, and we’re up 18%. Infrastructure revenues, which includes license support were 5.4 billion and up 13%.

Infrastructure cloud services revenue was up 49%. Excluding legacy hosting services, OCI Gen2 Infrastructure Cloud services revenue grew 52% with an annualized revenue of 6.7 billion. OCI consumption revenue was up 63%. Were it not for some continuing supply constraints, consumption growth would have been even higher. Database subscription revenue, which includes database license support, were up 5% and highlighted by cloud database services which were up 34% and now have annualized revenue of 1.9 billion.

Very importantly, as on-premise databases, my database — my — databases migrate to the cloud, we expect these cloud database services will be the third leg of revenue growth alongside strategic SaaS and OCI. Software license revenues were 1.3 billion, down 3%. So, all-in, total revenues for the quarter were 13.3 billion, up 7% including Cerner and up 9% excluding Cerner. Now, the margins.

The gross margin for cloud services and license support was 77%. This is as before a result of the mix between support and cloud, in which cloud is growing much faster than support. Support and SaaS gross margin percentages are consistent with last year, while IaaS gross margins improved substantially year over year. While we continue to build data center capacity, overall gross margins will go higher as more of our cloud regions fill up. We monitor these expenses carefully to ensure gross margin percentages expand as we scale.

And to that point, gross profit dollars of cloud services and license support grew 8% in Q3. Non-GAAP operating income was 5.8 billion, up 12% from last year. Operating margin was 44%, up from 42% last year as we continue to drive more efficiencies in our operating expenses, which continue to trend down as a percentage of revenue. Looking forward, as we continue to benefit from economies of scale in the cloud and drive Cerner profitability to Oracle standards, we will not only continue to grow operating income, but we will also expand the operating margin percentages. The non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was very close to my guidance at 18.9%, and non-GAAP EPS was $1.41 in USD, up 16% in both USD and constant currency. GAAP EPS was $0.85.

At the — at quarter end, we had nearly $9.9 billion in cash and marketable securities, and short-term deferred revenue balance — and the short-term deferred revenue balance was 8.9 billion, up 4%. Over the last four quarters, operating cash flow was 18.2 billion, up 18%; and free cash flow was 12.3 billion, up 68%. Capital expenditures were 6 billion over the same time period as we continue to see cash flow benefit from our cloud transformation. Our remaining performance obligation, or RPO, is now over 8 billion with the portion excluding Cerner up 41% in constant currency.

We signed several large deals this quarter, and we have many more in the pipeline. Approximately 43% of our total RPO is expected to be recognized as revenue over the next 12 months. And this reflects the growing trend of customers wanting larger contracts as they see firsthand how Oracle Cloud Services are benefiting their businesses. And we expect to have some very nice joint announcements with Nvidia next week. Now, while we spent 2.1 billion on capex this quarter, the 1.7 billion in the cash flow statement is slightly lower just due to the timing of payments. So, the 2.1 billion is actually what we spent and will pay for.

We are working as quickly as we can to get the cloud capacity built out given the enormity of our backlog and pipeline. I expect the capex will be somewhere around 7 billion to 7.5 billion this fiscal year, meaning our Q4 capex should be considerably higher. To that point, we now have 68 customer-facing cloud regions live, with 47 public cloud regions around the world and another eight being built. Twelve of these public cloud regions interconnect with Azure, and more locations with Microsoft are coming online soon. We also have 11 dedicated regions live and 13 more planned several national security regions in EU sovereign regions live with increasing demand for more of each.

And finally, we already have two Alloy cloud regions live with five more planned where Oracle partners become cloud providers offering customized cloud services alongside Oracle Cloud. And of course, we have also many many many cloud customer installations. As I mentioned earlier, the sizing, flexibility, and deployment optionality of our cloud regions continues to be incredible advantage for us in the marketplace. And as we’ve said before, we’re committed to returning value to our shareholders through technical innovation, acquisitions, stock repurchases, prudent use of debt, and a dividend. And this quarter, we repurchased 4 million shares for a total of 450 million. In addition, we paid out dividends of 4.4 billion over the last 12 months, and the board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.40 per share today.

Now, before I dive into Q4 guidance, I’d like to share some thoughts on what I see for the next 12 months or so. As demand for our cloud services continues getting stronger, our pipeline is growing even faster and our win rates are going higher as well. As our supply constraints ease, revenue growth rates will accelerate higher as our capacity expands and we get into fiscal year ’25. I should also say that we continue to expect the — FY ’24, of which we are now in the fourth quarter, total revenue excluding Cerner will accelerate from last year, as it has for the past three years, and will likely be significantly higher in FY ’25.

In addition, Cerner, which is a significant headwind this year, we expect to return to growth next year. And finally, and — and I remain firmly committed to our FY ’26 financial goals for revenue, operating margin, and EPS growth. However, some of these goals might prove to be too conservative given our momentum. Let me now turn to my guidance for Q4, which I’ll review on an — on GAAP basis as always. And if currency exchange rates remain the same as they are now, currency should have little effect on total revenue and EPS.

However, of course, actual currency impact may be different. So, at least right now, all the numbers are the same for — for constant currency and USD. Total revenues, including Cerner, are expected to grow from 4% to 6%. Total revenue, excluding Cerner, are expected to grow 6% to 8%. Total revenue — total cloud revenue, excluding Cerner, is expected to grow from 22% to 24% as more capacity comes online in Q4.

The EPS growth rate will be affected by the compare as our Q4 tax rate last year was 9.2%, which I believe most of you have already accounted for in your models. And my EPS guidance for Q4 assumes a base tax rate of 19%. As always, one-time tax events could cause actual tax rates to vary from my guidance, like they did last year. So, with that, non-GAAP EPS is expected to be down 2% or — to flat and be between $1.62 and $1.66.

And with that, I’ll turn it over to Larry for his comments.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Thank you, Safra. Well, Oracle signed another big Generation 2 cloud infrastructure contract with Nvidia in Q3. Oracle’s Gen2 AI infrastructure business is booming. That’s become pretty clear to everybody.

But in addition to selling infrastructure for training AI large language models, Oracle is also completely reengineering its industry-specific applications to take full advantage of generative artificial intelligence. The best example of this is in healthcare, where Oracle did not just add a bit of AI around the edges of existing applications. Instead, we developed completely new applications using our APEX application generator and our autonomous database. These all-new applications use generative AI throughout the application. The best example is in healthcare, where our new ambulatory clinic system is being delivered to customers this Q4. This completely new application features a voice interface called the Clinical Digital Assistant.

The Clininal Digital Assistant listens to a doctor’s consultations with a patient and automatically generates prescriptions, doctor’s orders, doctor’s notes, then automatically updates the patient’s electronic health records. The Clinical Digital Assistant’s voice interface makes our new healthcare systems dramatically easier to use and saves hours of doctors’ precious time every day, which now can be spent with patients rather than typing into a computer. The delivery of our new AI-centric healthcare cloud applications, including the ambulatory clinic system, the Clinical Digital Assistant, and the health data intelligence system, will enable the rapid modernization of our customer’s healthcare systems and transform Oracle Health and Cerner into a high-growth business for years to come. Ken, back to you.

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

We don’t hear you, Ken.

Ken Bond — Head of Investor Relations

Thank you. Thank you, Larry. Sorry about that. Krista, if you could please poll the audience for questions and if we could proceed from there.

Thank you.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

Absolutely. [Operator instructions] Your first question comes from the line of John DiFucci from Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.

John DiFucci — Guggenheim Partners — Analyst

Thank you. Safra, the infrastructure-as-a-service growth of 49% implies a Herculean increase in new business coming online, new ARR, the way we model it anyway, something I just thought you wouldn’t be able to do this quarter given — given how much you had to do, though we realized we don’t know the timing of when deals come online. But last quarter, you said you were going to reallocate resources to focus on some of these very large OCI deals to get them implemented earlier, so you start to get revenue earlier. Is that what happened this quarter? Is that what we’re seeing, or is that still — is that still to come?

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

I honestly, John, that is still to come. So, this is just pretty much our regular-way business. That’s what you’re seeing. We have enormous amounts of demand.

I tried to make that clear last quarter. And we have more capacity coming online, but we had tried to — you know, we tried to focus on much larger chunks of data center capacity and electricity and all of that. And that’s just — that’s all to come. This is really our regular-way business and our customers just growing. And a whole bunch of new customers, by the way, I think they’re there are many many customers who have come on and — that haven’t gotten capacity yet.

We’ve got at least 40 new AI bookings that are over a billion that haven’t come online yet.

John DiFucci — Guggenheim Partners — Analyst

That sounds —

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

John, that’s —

John DiFucci — Guggenheim Partners — Analyst

Go ahead, Larry. Sorry.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

OK, I’m — let me — let me add that Oracle is building data centers at a record level. And — and a lot of people, I think, are aware that we can build fairly small data centers to get started when we want to that — but the unique thing about Oracle’s data centers, they’re all identical except for scale. You do not have custom data centers. They all have all the Oracle services. They are all complete — one of the things that’s unusual about them, they’re all completely automated.

They come up on their own and they kind of run themselves. I mean, look, we do have a bunch of people, you know, working on — working on these data in these — on these data centers, but they are extremely high — they’re highly automated. Our operating system is autonomous Linux. Our database is the Oracle Autonomous Database.

Our new HeatWave database, Microsoft — MySQL Heatwave, is highly automated, and therefore, we can build — build — every time we build a data center, it’s like the data center we built before except for one thing, scale. We can go very small. We can get a full cloud data center with all the services and 10 racks — racks. But this is what I want to point out.

We’re also building the largest data centers in the world that we know of . We’re building an AI data center in the United States where you could park eight Boeing 747 nose-to-tail in that one data center. So, we are building large numbers of data centers, and we — and some of those data centers are smallish, but some of those data centers are the largest AI data centers in the world. So, we’re bringing on enormous amounts of capacity over the next 24 months. Because the — the demand the demand is so high, we — we need to do that to just satisfy our existing set of customers.

Give you an idea, one more thing, in terms of data centers, we’re building 20 data centers from Microsoft and Azure. They just ordered three more data centers this quarter. They’re adding — they’re adding to that already. And there are other multi-cloud agreements that are being signed.

There are multi-cloud — a number of multi-cloud agreements in Japan where computer manufacturers in Japan are adopting our cloud and will be reselling our cloud as partners. And we think NRI is already doing that, but there are a number of other companies that are going to be doing that. So, that’s something we’re seeing over demand for data centers of people who want to buy Alloy and then resell our — our cloud services with their — with their proprietary cloud services on top of it, you know, we’re seeing that. So, some of our largest customers all over the world want their own Oracle region. They don’t want to share a public cloud. They want they — they want a cloud region dedicated — or actually, multiple cloud regions dedicated to that bank or that — or that technology company or that — or that telephone company.

So, they’re building their own data centers, which are — those are — those are Oracle Cloud data centers. They are — they’re all identical, so we’re able to automate and run those with not a lot of additional labor costs. It’s a huge advantage for us.

John DiFucci — Guggenheim Partners — Analyst

Well, thank you, Larry and Safra. And, listen, what you put up this quarter in infrastructure as a service, it just looks pretty impressive, but it sounds like there’s a lot more to come. Thank you for taking my question.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

John, my last comment will be — would be the growth in RPO is what’s to come. And RPO is obviously growing faster than revenue because we can’t meet the demand. That’s — that’s the measure of demand. The 80 billion RPO is quite a — an acceleration of demand.

So, demand is not slowing down, it’s actually increasing quite a bit.

John DiFucci — Guggenheim Partners — Analyst

Well, there are a lot of questions on that last quarter, and I guess there won’t be any on this one. Thank you.

Ken Bond — Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, John. Next question, please.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays — Analyst

Hey, thank you, and congrats from me as well. I wanted to talk a little bit about Cerner. In the announcement, you talked about the most of Cerner now, is — is running out of your OCI. Well, first of all, there’s a very quick turnaround here, well done.

What’s kind of the implications for that, both from running efficiency but also innovation on the platform? Thank you.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Well, two things. One is we save a huge amount of money moving them into our standard data center, right, because our OCI — OCI costs are much lower than the cost of the Cerner-dedicated data center in Kansas City. Also, the big thing that we’re excited about is OCI is highly secure. It’s got a highly secure perimeter. And therefore, those — you know, those applications are much less vulnerable to ransomware or other kind of attacks than if they were in a different kind of data center.

So, we’re very happy that these are now secured. The — the third thing is now that they’re in our cloud, we’re able to update those applications on our regular — on a regular three-month cadence. So, we’re able to modernize those customers that are in the cloud on a regular basis and start delivering our — our brand-new applications, the completely rewritten Cerner application, first, for ambulatory clinics and then eventually for acute care hospitals. And the ambulatory clinic system is coming out this quarter. And we’re able to automatically deliver the — you know, that system to existing customers. It’s not a reimplementation, it is literally an update to what they’ve already got running in the Oracle Cloud. Even though it’s an all-new application, I’m not going into much technical detail, but it uses the same underlying data schema.

So, we literally can bring up the new application, you know, without the customer having to go through any implementation process. We can do it just as an update, like when we ship a new version of Fusion to an existing Fusion customer. We can now ship a new version of an all-new version of the Cerner application to a Cerner customer in OCI. So, it allows us to modernize their infrastructure very very rapidly, deliver the voice — Clinical Digital Assistant, make the system easier to use, save doctors’ time, deliver a lot more value, put in the diagnostic, imaging systems.

The health data intelligence system deliver all of that automatically on a regular three-month cadence. So, it allows us to modernize the Cerner base very very quickly while keeping them safe from ransomware.

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays — Analyst

Perfect. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ben Reitzes from Melius Research. Please go ahead.

Ben Reitzes — Melius Research — Analyst

Yeah, thanks. It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you this afternoon. Larry and Safra, can you talk a little bit about capex? It — your guidance implies a almost doubling of capex in the fourth quarter. And then, what kind of trajectory is needed for the next fiscal year given this RPO growth, what kind of uptick is needed? And, Larry, if you don’t mind, you know, what — if you can give some color on, you know, GPU availability and how that plays in versus data center requirements in terms of that spending.

Thanks so much.

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

So, for fiscal year — for fiscal year ’25, I’m looking at about 10 billion in capex because it also involves, not only some big centers, but it also involves expansion of existing centers. So, we’ve already got some areas that will be filling out. So, at least preliminarily, we’re looking at 10 billion for next year. And then, you know, it’s — it’s not too complicated to figure out the math here when I’m looking at somewhere between 7 billion and 7.5 billion for the — for the full year. And you’ve got all the numbers for Q1, 2, and 3 at this point.

And I would include, for Q3, the one we just turned down, saying, I would, you know, add in the amount we haven’t paid yet as — as the capex number for this quarter, OK? And that gets — yeah, that would be — and then, Larry gets the second question. But anyway, so 2.1 for this quarter and — and you’ve got Q1 and Q2, and I’m going to be somewhere between 7 billion and 7.5 billion for the full year, which is actually a little bit lower than — than I thought. But we — we were able to do pretty well, you know, how we spend very carefully.

Ben Reitzes — Melius Research — Analyst

Great. Thanks. And, Larry, the — the amount that — you know, how’s the GPU availability in terms of you hitting your goals and, you know, vis a vis, you know, other bottlenecks that could be out there?

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

Can I take at least part of this?

Ben Reitzes — Melius Research — Analyst

Oh, yeah, sure.

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

The GPU, we are good. We are actually very good in — in our GPU access and capabilities. So, building the computers, and — and that it’s much more making sure we’ve got the power on that.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Yeah, thank you, Safra. Safra says we have a great relationship with Nvidia. You know, they’re — they’re a customer of ours, as well as us being a customer of theirs, and we work very closely together, So, that’s going pretty well. Building these — let me — the scale of some of these data centers is breathtaking.

Again, the one we’re building in Salt Lake, again, you — you can park eight 747s nose-to-tail. We can give you a video of this — of this thing under construction, but it’s hard — I mean, it’s breathtaking. So, there’s a tremendous amount of demand. The data centers take longer to build than we would like.

That’s — That said, we are getting very good at building them quickly. And — and getting the building and the power and the communication links in, we’re doing faster than we have ever had in the past. And the thing is, once we deliver the hardware, the hardware comes up very very quickly because the — the process of bringing up the hardware is now all automated. It’s very different than it used to be. So, we’re able to bring additional capacity online very quickly if we have the — the electric power and the communication lines. So, the long pole in the tent is actually building the — building the structure, connecting the electricity, and connecting the communication links.

Ben Reitzes — Melius Research — Analyst

Thanks, Larry. Appreciate it. Congrats on the OCI growth.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Derrick Wood from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Derrick Wood — TD Cowen — Analyst

Great. Thank you. Larry, just within the last few months, you guys have enabled Oracle Database and OCI to be run on top of Azure, which seems like a fairly significant development. Can you talk about what the customer reception has been around this announcement, how you think it could change the arc of new investments on the Oracle database platform, and what this means for potentially unlocking a stronger adoption cycle for autonomous database?

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Well, I think it is the key to unlocking a stronger adoption cycle for — move a — moving Oracle in general — to the cloud in general and the — specifically the migration to Autonomous Database. Oracle, we expect the multi-cloud initiative to continue to expand that we’re seeing it expand in Japan, but we expected to expand among other hyperscalers, to adopt a similar — you know, a similar multi-cloud approach where we build — we build OCI regions inside of and coexisting — with their existing cloud infrastructure. We think the world — the era of walled gardens is coming to an end, where it used to be, OK, I’m going to move all my stuff to AWS or I’m going to move all my stuff to Azure. What customers really want is the ability to use multiple clouds and for those multiple clouds to talk to one another. And I think — I mean, in the era of the internet and now cloud computing — it is really called cloud computing.; it’s not called a bunch of separate clouds.

The — so, we expect multiple cloud to become the norm and Oracle to be available everywhere. And we think that — and back to what you said, we think that will preserve our franchise and database where we’ve been the No. 1 database in the IT ecosystem for a very long time. We think that’s going to preserve that franchise and expand it because the Autonomous Database is a unique piece of technology, and there’s nothing like it in the world. And maybe the most interesting thing, no one else is working on anything like that.

No one else is even trying to duplicate the autonomous database. So, we think it will be — it will become a very successful product in every cloud.

Derrick Wood — TD Cowen — Analyst

Thanks, Larry.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Kirk Materne from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Kirk Materne — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Yeah, thanks very much for taking the questions, and congrats on an incredible bookings quarter. Larry, I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about the interest level on Alloy in international markets where there might be a bit of a premium on data sovereignty and, you know, maybe how that’s impacting the growth opportunity for OCI when we look out toward the balance of calendar ’24. Thanks.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Well, I think Japan is maybe the most interesting market where we — we had early success with NRI. You know, they — you know, they run the Tokyo Stock Exchange. You know, what NRI has is just — is an Oracle — a couple of Oracle cloud regions, which they resell in the financial services community inside of Japan. And one of their applications is — is a major stock exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange. So, think about how many clouds run stock exchanges, that would be ours.

It’s got to be highly secure. It can never go down. It’s got to have extremely high transaction rates. We can do that.

And the success of NRI has caused other — the other computer companies in Japan to become very very interested and also reselling our cloud with — and — and we also have the ability that they can add on some of their own technology to our cloud. So, our cloud is open, so you can plug in other things to the cloud. So, imagine a big computer company in Japan adopting the Oracle Cloud, reselling autonomous database, reselling all of our technologies because all we — we only make one kind of cloud. They’re all the same, and they have all of the services, but then that company can add their own services to their — for their customers. We think all of the cloud companies in Japan are going to adopt OCI, plus a lot of big companies — or big car companies in Japan will want — want their own. The phone companies in Japan will want their own. The technology companies in Japan will want their own Oracle regions and because they’re sovereign, because they’re highly secure, and because they’re highly cost-effective.

So, we think this allows us to enter a variety of new markets. Every government — pretty much every government is going to want a sovereign cloud and a dedicated region for that government for not only — so, we see a number of countries — you know, it’s funny we talk about, you know, winning business with companies. For the first time, we’re beginning to win business country — for countries, you know, for the — for sovereign clouds where the national government and the state governments are moving to that Oracle OCI region. And of course, it’s got to be at least two of them for redundancy, for, you know — and in case of disaster and disaster recovery. So, we have a number of countries where we’re — we’re negotiating, you know, sovereign regions with the national government.

We see that time and time again, major companies, governments, computer — computer suppliers, reselling our — our Alloy cloud. The demand for our cloud regions is extraordinarily high. I believe we will end up — this is a funny prediction, but OK, we’ll end up with more data centers and cloud regions than all the other hyperscalers combined [Inaudible].

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Sure. I think — just to make sure you have all the numbers between Alloy and dedicated regions, we’ve got 13 live, we’ve got 18 under construction, and we’ve signed five new ones just this past quarter. So, for us, it’s — they’re — they’re just — there’s just a list we’re going through and trying to get them all because they are such a unique capability and in such high demand.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

And let me — let me just have one last thing. Microsoft does not compete for this business. AWS does not compete for this business. Google does not compete for this business.

We’re the only ones in this business.

Kirk Materne — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Thank you, all.

Operator

Our final question today comes from Brad Zelnick from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Brad Zelnick — Deutsche Bank — Analyst

Thanks very much for taking my question. Larry, my question actually follows on your answer to Kirk’s question because I think it’s so important. You know, in talking to one of your GSI partners, we heard about a global public sector solution that they referred to as government in a box, where Oracle, in partnership with the likes of Starlink, the Tony Blair project, are building solutions on top of OCI, including apps and tech and even Cerner to literally run entire country’s digital operations. So, hoping you can — you can add even a little bit more color about what you’re doing here, how big an opportunity it is, because it just seems like such a powerful example of the entire Oracle Cloud stack coming together in a very meaningful way.

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

Well, it is really really — it’s very interesting and we’ve gone into the, you know, government — national government and state government applications in a very very big way. To give you an idea, a little glimpse of what we’re doing. Yes, we — because we can deliver these cloud regions to medium-sized countries, so, for example, Serbia, is standardizing on — or these Oracle cloud regions for, you know, for the — for the national government, we’re automating their healthcare. And people know that when — we’re in the healthcare business.

What they might not know is, in cooperation with Starlink, we’re able to deliver on an internet service to — for the entire country, rural — you know, the rural part of the country. By the way, we can deliver the internet and we have delivered the internet to, let’s say, Kenya or Rwanda very inexpensively using Starlink and our — and our sovereign cloud regions to back — backhaul the internet — the internet — internet traffic. So, you can bring every school in Serbia online, has internet connectivity. Even if they’re rural, doesn’t matter, every school, every hospital.

It’s true of Rwanda, that’s true of Kenya. We can do it very very cost effectively. And one of the applications we have for agriculture, we actually do a national map of the country where we can show you each of the farms in the country, what their — this farm is growing coffee, this farm is growing maize, this farm — which part of the fields are — are getting enough nitrogen, which part of the fields are getting enough water, what corrective actions you need to take to increase your agricultural output. We’re doing that, again, in concert with Elon Musk and SpaceX to do this kind of mapping to provide this a — this AI-assisted. And then, these maps are AI-assisted, help them plan their agricultural output and predict their agricultural output, predict markets, the logistics of the agricultural output, doing all of all of those things as next-generation national applications.

And it is one of the most exciting things we’re doing. Of course, we do procurement and accounting, and human resources and recruiting, you know, for the government, we do all of those applications, but it’s some of the newer applications regarding food security, so making sure all the schools are online — rural schools are online, that rural hospitals are online. It’s automating those — those rural hospitals. It’s automating their vaccination program, their healthcare program across the board. These next-generation applications are very attractive. I’ll tell you one other crazy thing that we do.

We’re — another generative AI application. If you want to join the EU — it took Serbia eight years to harmonize their laws to be able to join the EU. Albania is facing the same thing, but with generative AI, we can read the entire corpus of the Albanian laws and — and actually harmonize their laws with the EU in probably more like 18 months to two years rather than the eight years it took Serbia. So, there are all sorts of interesting new AI applications out there that people you — you’ve probably never heard of before, at least I hadn’t heard of before until these last 12 months now that we’ve worked on and we’re now in the process of delivering.

Brad Zelnick — Deutsche Bank — Analyst

Really amazing stuff, Larry. Thank you and congrats. And, Safra, really great to see the firm reiteration of your fiscal ’26 targets. Thanks so much for taking my question.

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Ken Bond — Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, Brad. A telephonic replay of this conference call will be available for 24 hours on our Investor Relations website. Thank you for joining us today. And with that, I’ll turn the call back to Krista for closing.

Operator

[Operator signoff]

Duration: 0 minutes

Call participants:

Ken Bond — Head of Investor Relations

Safra Catz — Chief Executive Officer

Larry Ellison — Chairman and Chief Technology Officer

John DiFucci — Guggenheim Partners — Analyst

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays — Analyst

Ben Reitzes — Melius Research — Analyst

Derrick Wood — TD Cowen — Analyst

Kirk Materne — Evercore ISI — Analyst

Brad Zelnick — Deutsche Bank — Analyst

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