Oracle’s ‘Astonishing’ Quarter Stuns Wall Street, Targeting Cloud Growth and Global Data Center Expansion Oracle’s FY Q1 2026 earnings report on September 9 — along with its massive cloud backlog — stunned Wall Street with its blow-out Q1 earnings. The market reacted positively to the huge growth in infrastructure revenue and performance obligations (RPO), a measure of future revenue from customer contracts, which indicates significant growth potential and Oracle’s increasing role in AI technology—even as earnings and revenue missed estimates. After the earnings announcement, Oracle stock soared more than 36%, marking its biggest daily gain since December 1992 and adding more than $250 billion in market value to the company. The company’s stock surge came even as the software giant’s earnings and lower-than-expected revenue. Leaders reported company’s RPO jumped about 360% in the quarter to $455 billion, indicating its potential growth and demand for its cloud services and infrastructure. As a result, Oracle CEO Safra Catz projects that its GPU‑heavy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) business will grow 77% to $18 billion in its current fiscal year (2026) and soar to $144 billion in 2030. The earnings announcement also made Oracle’s Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison the richest person in the world briefly, with shares of Oracle surging as much as 43%. By the end of the trading day, his wealth increased nearly $90 billion to $383 billion, just shy of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $384 billion fortune. Also on the earnings call, Ellison announced that in October at the Oracle AI World event, the company will introduce the Oracle AI Database OCI for customers to use the Large Language Model (LLM) of their choice—including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, etc.—directly on top of the Oracle Database to easily access and analyze all existing database data. Capital Expenditure Strategy These astonishing numbers are due

IEEE 802.3df-2024. The IEEE 802.3df-2024 standard, completed in February 2024 marked a watershed moment for AI data center networking. The 800 Gigabit Ethernet specification provides the foundation for next-generation AI clusters. It uan 8-lane parallel structure that enables flexible port configurations from a single 800GbE port: 2×400GbE, 4×200GbE or 8×100GbE depending on workload requirements. The standard maintains backward compatibility with existing 100Gb/s electrical and optical signaling. This protects existing infrastructure investments while enabling seamless migration paths. UEC 1.0. The Ultra Ethernet Consortium represents the industry’s most ambitious attempt to optimize Ethernet for AI workloads. The consortium released its UEC 1.0 specification in 2025, marking a critical milestone for AI networking. The specification introduces modern RDMA implementations, enhanced transport protocols and advanced congestion control mechanisms that eliminate the need for traditional lossless networks. UEC 1.0 enables packet spraying at the switch level with reordering at the NIC, delivering capabilities previously available only in proprietary systems The UEC specification also includes Link Level Retry (LLR) for lossless transmission without traditional Priority Flow Control, addressing one of Ethernet’s historical weaknesses versus InfiniBand.LLR operates at the link layer to detect and retransmit lost packets locally, avoiding expensive recovery mechanisms at higher layers. Packet Rate Improvement (PRI) with header compression reduces protocol overhead, while network probes provide real-time congestion visibility. InfiniBand extends architectural advantages to 800Gb/s InfiniBand emerged in the late 1990s as a high-performance interconnect designed specifically for server-to-server communication in data centers. Unlike Ethernet, which evolved from local area networking,InfiniBand was purpose-built for the demanding requirements of clustered computing. The technology provides lossless, ultra-low latency communication through hardware-based flow control and specialized network adapters. The technology’s key advantage lies in its credit-based flow control. Unlike Ethernet’s packet-based approach, InfiniBand prevents packet loss by ensuring receiving buffers have space before transmission begins. This eliminates

Land and Expand is a monthly feature at Data Center Frontier highlighting the latest data center development news, including new sites, land acquisitions and campus expansions. Here are some of the new and notable developments from hyperscale and colocation data center operators about which we’ve been reading lately. Caroline County, VA, Approves 650-Acre Data Center Campus from CleanArc Caroline County, Virginia, has approved redevelopment of the former Virginia Bazaar property in Ruther Glen into a 650-acre data center campus in partnership with CleanArc Data Centers Operating, LLC. On September 9, 2025, the Caroline County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an economic development performance agreement with CleanArc to transform the long-vacant flea market site just off I-95. The agreement allows for the phased construction of three initial data center buildings, each measuring roughly 500,000 square feet, which CleanArc plans to lease to major operators. The project represents one of the county’s largest-ever private investments. While CleanArc has not released a final capital cost, county filings suggest the development could reach into the multi-billion-dollar range over its full buildout. Key provisions include: Local hiring: At least 50 permanent jobs at no less than 150% of the prevailing county wage. Revenue sharing: Caroline County will provide annual incentive grants equal to 25% of incremental tax revenue generated by the campus. Water stewardship: CleanArc is prohibited from using potable county water for data center cooling, requiring the developer to pursue alternative technologies such as non-potable sources, recycled water, or advanced liquid cooling systems. Local officials have emphasized the deal’s importance for diversifying the county’s tax base, while community observers will be watching closely to see which cooling strategies CleanArc adopts in order to comply with the water-use restrictions. Google to Build $10 Billion Data Center Campus in Arkansas Moses Tucker Partners, one of Arkansas’

As the data center industry continues to chase greater performance for AI and scientific workloads, a new joint report from Hyperion Research and Alice & Bob is urging high performance computing (HPC) centers to take immediate steps toward integrating early fault-tolerant quantum computing (eFTQC) into their infrastructure. The report, “Seizing Quantum’s Edge: Why and How HPC Should Prepare for eFTQC,” paints a clear picture: the next five years will demand hybrid HPC-quantum workflows if institutions want to stay at the forefront of computational science. According to the analysis, up to half of current HPC workloads at U.S. government research labs—Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Department of Energy leadership computing facilities among them—could benefit from the speedups and efficiency gains of eFTQC. “Quantum technologies are a pivotal opportunity for the HPC community, offering the potential to significantly accelerate a wide range of critical science and engineering applications in the near-term,” said Bob Sorensen, Senior VP and Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing at Hyperion Research. “However, these machines won’t be plug-and-play, so HPC centers should begin preparing for integration now, ensuring they can influence system design and gain early operational expertise.” The HPC Bottleneck: Why Quantum is Urgent The report underscores a familiar challenge for the HPC community: classical performance gains have slowed as transistor sizes approach physical limits and energy efficiency becomes increasingly difficult to scale. Meanwhile, the threshold for useful quantum applications is drawing nearer. Advances in qubit stability and error correction, particularly Alice & Bob’s cat qubit technology, have compressed the resource requirements for algorithms like Shor’s by an estimated factor of 1,000. Within the next five years, the report projects that quantum computers with 100–1,000 logical qubits and logical error rates between 10⁻⁶ and 10⁻¹⁰ will accelerate applications across materials science, quantum

Transmission and Power Strategy These agreements build on Google’s growing set of strategies to manage electricity needs. In June of 2025, Google announced a deal with CTC Global to upgrade transmission lines with high-capacity composite conductors that increase throughput without requiring new towers. In July 2025, Google and Brookfield Asset Management unveiled a hydropower framework agreement worth up to $3 billion, designed to secure firm clean energy for data centers in PJM and Eastern markets. Alongside renewable deals, Google has signed nuclear supply agreements as well, most notably a landmark contract with Kairos Power for small modular reactor capacity. Each of these moves reflects Google’s effort to create more headroom on the grid while securing firm, carbon-free power. Workload Flexibility and Grid Innovation The demand-response strategy is uniquely suited to AI data centers because of workload diversity. Machine learning training runs can sometimes be paused or rescheduled, unlike latency-sensitive workloads. This flexibility allows Google to throttle certain compute-heavy processes in coordination with utilities. In practice, Google can preemptively pause or shift workloads when notified of peak events, ensuring critical services remain uninterrupted while still creating significant grid relief. Local Utility Impact For utilities like I&M and TVA, partnering with hyperscale customers has a dual benefit: stabilizing the grid while keeping large customers satisfied and growing within their service territories. It also signals to regulators and ratepayers that data centers, often criticized for their heavy energy footprint, can actively contribute to reliability. These agreements may help avoid contentious rate cases or delays in permitting new power plants. Policy, Interconnection Queues, and the Economics of Speed One of the biggest hurdles for data center development today is the long wait in interconnection queues. In regions like PJM Interconnection, developers often face waits of three to five years before new projects can connect

A Strategic Leap Generac’s entry represents a strategic leap. Long established as a leader in residential, commercial, and industrial generation—particularly in the sub-2 megawatt range—the company has now expanded into mission-critical applications with new products spanning 2.2 to 3.5 megawatts. Navarro said the timing was deliberate, citing market constraints that have slowed hyperscale and colocation growth. “The current OEMs serving this market are actually limiting the ability to produce and to grow the data center market,” he noted. “Having another player … with enough capacity to compensate those shortfalls has been received very, very well.” While Generac isn’t seeking to reinvent the wheel, it is intent on differentiation. Customers, Navarro explained, want a good quality product, uneventful deployment, and a responsive support network. On top of those essentials, Generac is leveraging its ongoing transformation from generator manufacturer to energy technology company, a shift accelerated by a series of acquisitions in areas like telemetry, monitoring, and energy management. “We’ve made several acquisitions to move away from being just a generator manufacturer to actually being an energy technology company,” Navarro said. “So we are entering this space of energy efficiency, energy management—monitoring, telemetrics, everything that improves the experience and improves the usage of those generators and the energy management at sites.” That foundation positions Generac to meet the newest challenge reshaping backup generation: the rise of AI-centric workloads. Natural Gas Interest—and the Race to Shorter Lead Times As the industry looks beyond diesel, customer interest in natural gas generation is rising. Navarro acknowledged the shift, but noted that diesel still retains an edge. “We’ve seen an increase on gas requests,” he said. “But the power density of diesel is more convenient than gas today.” That tradeoff, however, could narrow. Navarro pointed to innovations such as industrial storage paired with gas units, which