Our team presents a snapshot of the latest on the Tech Scene, courtesy of the team at The Information on Oracle, Broadcom, Microsoft and other thoughts:
Step aside, young folks of tech. This week we hear from the industry’s, ah, elder statesmen—specifically Larry Ellison at Oracle and Hock Tan from Broadcom, whose combined age is about 150. Oracle and Broadcom are each reporting their latest quarterly earnings this week, when the status of their newish AI businesses will be in the spotlight. In the case of Oracle, we’ll be looking for an update on its AI-related cloud expansion while Broadcom will be reporting the latest numbers for its AI chip business. Both businesses, to be clear, are in their early days of expansion—at least if we believe Ellison and Tan.
Take Broadcom. Its AI-related revenue grew by more than 60% in the first three quarters of its 2025 fiscal year, and it has projected slightly faster growth in that segment for the October quarter, which it’s reporting on Thursday. That should bring AI revenue to $19.9 billion for fiscal 2025, compared with $12.2 billion in fiscal 2024. That’s peanuts compared with Nvidia, whose AI chip business made up most of the company’s $57 billion third quarter revenue. Broadcom isn’t likely to catch up to Nvidia—well, probably ever—but it will certainly grow. Its chip customers include Google, whose AI chip business appears to be taking off. Tan last December forecast that the AI chip and networking market he is aiming at will explode to between $60 billion and $90 billion by 2027, implying that Broadcom’s business can expand enormously in the next two years. We'll be watching for updates this week. (For more on Tan, see our Weekend profile, published on Friday.)
AI is only a minority of Broadcom’s business, by the way, but it is a growing portion, lately representing about a third. Overall, Broadcom’s revenue is expected to grow 24% to $17.5 billion, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Oracle is in a similar position. Its cloud business, which is tiny compared with giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, has started growing at a 50%-plus rate in the past few quarters. It’s still small—quarterly revenue has been running at just above $3 billion, about a fifth of the total company’s. But Oracle’s disclosure in September that deals it has booked will lift cloud revenue to $144 billion by 2030—which sent its stock soaring—implies that its real inflection in growth is yet to come. By 2030, analysts expect the cloud business will account for the majority of its revenue.
Of course, 2030 is a long time away. Oracle’s customers include OpenAI, which still has to raise the money to pay for its future cloud commitments. Oracle, meanwhile, has to finance its data center expansion. So investors are a little nervous. Their mood, which has dragged down the stock in recent weeks, may not change after this week’s earnings update. Analysts estimate that overall revenue will rise 14.8%, according to S&P, which is an uptick on the single-digit percentage growth rate Oracle was reporting a few quarters ago but is far from the growth Oracle should deliver in the next few years. What we’re really looking for on Wednesday, when Oracle reports, is an update on its efforts to raise financing for its new data centers and the latest on the size of its long-term customer commitments. And given how bears have crowded into Oracle stock lately, Ellison may want to try to dissipate some of the skepticism.
The Ellisons, Warner and Netflix
The Ellisons have a lot on their mind these days, and it’s not all about data centers. On Friday, Netflix beat out the Ellison-controlled Paramount Skydance in the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. This contest is far from over, however. There’s a very good chance the Trump administration will block the Netflix-Warner tie-up on antitrust grounds. And given that the elder Ellison is close to President Donald Trump, there’s also a decent chance that Paramount would win approval for any deal it does.
On Friday, CNBC reported that Paramount was considering making an offer directly to WBD shareholders. Paramount’s regulatory edge would likely weigh heavily on the minds of shareholders. There may be some shareholders in WBD who held the stock back in 2016, when AT&T agreed to buy the company formerly known as Time Warner—only to see the closing delayed until mid-2018 as the Justice Department unsuccessfully fought the deal in court. It’s doubtful WBD investors want to go through that again.
In Other News
• Microsoft’s shareholders approved the board’s proposed compensation for CEO Satya Nadella and other top executives on Friday, raising his pay to $96.5 million, up from $79.1 million last year. The majority of his compensation will come from stock awards, while his base salary is $2.5 million.
• Japanese conglomerate SoftBank is in talks to acquire DigitalBridge, one of the largest publicly traded investors in data center companies, Bloomberg reported.
• The New York Times sued Perplexity for copyright infringement, adding to a mounting pile of lawsuits against the AI search startup.
• The EU hit Elon Musk’s X with a $140 million fine on Friday, citing several issues with the design and maintenance of the social media service. It’s the first time the EU has levied a fine under the Digital Services Act, a sweeping set of tech regulations it passed in 2022.
• Elon Musk’s SpaceX is considering an IPO in 2026, The Information reported on Friday.
• Google cannot require partners like Apple or Samsung to distribute its generative AI products like Gemini as a condition of licensing Google’s other apps such as Google Maps, a federal judge ruled on Friday as part of the final remedies judgment governing how Google must address its illegal search monopoly. More here.
• Meta Platforms has postponed the launch of its next-generation mixed-reality glasses, code-named Phoenix, from the second half of 2026 to the first half of 2027, Business Insider reported.
• The executive in charge of Apple’s hugely successful in-house chip design efforts is eyeing an exit from the company, Bloomberg reported. Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, has told the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, that he is “seriously considering” departing Apple in the near future, the publication reported.
• X has cut off the advertising account of the European Commission days after the agency imposed a €120 million fine on the platform for breaching the Digital Services Act, a set of regulations governing internet companies. More here.
