Shares of cloud computing giant Oracle plunged more than 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the company’s revenues fell short of Wall Street expectations.The company reported revenue of $16.06bn (£11.99bn) for the three months that ended in November, compared with the $16.21bn projected by analysts.Revenue growth was up 14%, with a 68% surge in sales at its AI business, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company said.OCI services major AI technology developers whose demand for Oracle’s AI infrastructure helped the company’s shares reach new highs this fall but Wednesday’s results failed to quell fears about a potential AI bubble.In September, Oracle agreed a highly sought-after contract with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which agreed to purchase $300bn in computing power from Oracle over five years.Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison briefly became the world’s richest man in after the announcement.But the firm’s shares have lost 40% of their value since peaking three months ago. Still, they are up by more than a third since the start of the year.In a statement issued on Wednesday, Mr Ellison struck a cautious tone.”There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years and we must remain agile in response to those changes,” he wrote.Mr Ellison also appeared to snub Nvidia, the designer of highly-sophisticated AI chips, saying Oracle would buy chips from any maker in order to serve clients.”We will continue to buy the latest GPUs from Nvidia, but we need to be prepared and able to deploy whatever chips our customers want to buy,” Mr Ellison declared in a policy he called “chip neutrality”.Oracle is involved in multiple AI infrastructure arrangements that have raised the prospect that major players in the sector are participating in ‘circular financing’ deals whereby companies finance purchases of their own products and s …
