Want to invest around artificial intelligence? Take a look at Oracle , according to Barclays. Oracle shares have surged nearly 48% in 2023 and close to 62% over the past 12 months. And Barclays thinks the company is set to maintain high levels of growth in the near future as its tailwinds have yet to fully take effect. Analyst Raimo Lenschow upgraded shares to overweight from equal weight. He also raised his price target to $150 from $126, suggesting 24% upside from Friday’s close. ORCL YTD mountain ORCL in 2023 “We see a multi-year opportunity for solid growth at high margins driven by an ongoing positive mix effect of better [software-as-a-service] and [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] (OCI)I outweigh the lower growth parts of the business,” Lenschow wrote in a Tuesday note. “OCI, partly fueled by emerging AI workloads, will be key to the database and overall story.” He added that OCI is well-positioned for an AI tailwind due to its close relationship with Nvidia. Oracle was also one of the first cloud solutions providers to enter the market with Nvidia’s software-as-a-service products, Lenschow added. Overall, the analyst is confident OCI will be one of the company’s core drivers of growth. He added that other software offerings Fusion and NetSuite will also help propel the company’s growth story. “OCI 2.0 has led to a growth inflection for the infrastructure business, and we think there is more room to go here given the small scale and AI as an additional tailwind,” Lenschow said. “The business may never reach the size of AWS or Azure, but we don’t think this is necessary given the smaller size of the overall company compared to these hyperscalers. More important is that OCI is following a similar trajectory of growth as AWS and Azure when the offerings were at a similar scale.” Shares of Oracle gained 1.6% Tuesday during premarket trading. —CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
