Every investor in Oracle stock should be watching this key number in September

Oracle (ORCL 0.53%) participated in almost every technological revolution. Over the past 25 years, he has helped businesses prepare for the dawn of the Internet, cloud computing, and now, artificial intelligence (AI).

The company operates one of the best AI data center infrastructures in the industry. It allows developers to scale up to 32,768 Nvidiaits graphics processing units (GPUs), more than many of its top competitors. More GPUs translate to bigger AI models.

Oracle’s Random Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking technology moves data from one point to another faster than traditional Ethernet networks. Because developers pay for computing capacity by the minute, this results in substantial cost savings.

President Larry Ellison says Oracle Gen2 AI data centers can train AI models twice as fast and at half the cost of competing infrastructure.

Oracle sells data center capacity under its Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) segment. Its revenue has grown more than 40% year-over-year in each of the past four quarters, making it the fastest-growing part of the entire organization:

Oracle is forecasting OCI revenue growth of more than 50% during fiscal 2025. The company will report its first quarter (ended August 31) results in early September, so investors should keep a close eye on this segment.

Growth is likely to accelerate in the coming quarters as demand for Oracle’s infrastructure outstrips supply. This was evident in the company’s remaining performance obligations in the latest fiscal 2024 fourth quarter (ended May 31), which rose 44% to a record $98 billion. This included deals worth $12.5 billion from more than 30 AI companies.

Oracle is rapidly building new data centers to meet this demand. Its revenue growth will benefit as new locations come online.