The Oracle bone script experienced a sharp decline in after-hours trading. Cloud business sales fell short of expectations, leading to concerns about increased AI spending.

Oracle fell more than 10% in after-hours trading, after announcing that spending on artificial intelligence data centers and other equipment had increased significantly, but the time needed for these expenses to cloud revenue was longer than investors expected. The company's cloud business sales in the second quarter grew 34% to $7.98 billion, while the infrastructure business revenue, which is closely watched, increased 68% to $4.08 billion. Both of these numbers were slightly below analysts' expectations. Oracle, known for its database software, has recently been successful in the competitive cloud computing market, as the company is building data centers on a large scale to support the artificial intelligence work of OpenAI and other major cloud business clients like Meta Platforms Inc. The company announced on Wednesday that as of the end of the quarter on November 30th, the indicator measuring order volume - remaining performance obligations - had more than quadrupled to $523 billion, surpassing analysts' average estimate of $519 billion.