Oracle is planning to build a gigawatt-scale data center powered by three small nuclear reactors (SMRs), according to founder Larry Ellison.

CTO and chairman Ellison told investors during an earnings call this week that Oracle currently has 162 cloud data centers in operation or under construction globally, the largest of which has a capacity of 800MW and is set to house Nvidia GPU clusters.

But the company will "soon" begin the construction of data centers that surpass a gigawatt of capacity, according to Ellison.

One of those projects, Ellison said, has a location already selected and is in the middle of the design process. The data center is set to be nuclear-powered, with Oracle already having building permits for three small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).

Further details of the project were not shared, DCD has reached out for more information.

Oracle posts quarterly earnings

Oracle's revenues reached $13.3 billion for Q1 of fiscal year 2025.

This represents a growth of seven percent in USD year-on-year (YoY) and eight percent in constant currency.

Of that $13.3bn, cloud services counted for $5.6 billion (up 21 percent YoY in USD), while cloud license and on-premise license revenues were $870 million (up seven percent YoY in USD).

Infrastructure cloud services have an annualized revenue of $8.6 billion, with OCI consumption revenue up 56 percent.

"As Cloud Services became Oracle's largest business, both our operating income and earnings per share growth accelerated," said Oracle CEO, Safra Catz. "Non-GAAP operating income was up 14 percent in constant currency to $5.7 billion, and non-GAAP EPS was up 18 percent in constant currency to $1.39 in Q1. RPO was up 53 percent from last year to a record $99 billion.

"That strong contract backlog will increase revenue growth throughout FY25. But the biggest news of all was signing a MultiCloud agreement with AWS—including our latest technology Exadata hardware and Version 23ai of our database software—embedded into AWS cloud data centers. AWS customers will get easy and convenient access to the Oracle database when we go live in December later this year."

"In Q1, 42 additional cloud GPU contracts were signed for a total of $3 billion. Our database business growth rate is increasing as a result of our MultiCloud agreements with Microsoft and Google. At the end of Q1, seven Oracle Cloud regions were live at Microsoft with 24 more being built, and four Oracle Cloud regions were live at Google with 14 more being built. Our recently signed AWS contract was a milestone in the multi-cloud Era.  Soon customers will be able [to] use the latest Oracle database technology from within every Hyperscaler's cloud," said Ellison.

Oracle's capex for the quarter was $2.3 billion, with Catz adding "I expect the fiscal year 2025 capex will be double what it was in fiscal 2024. As always, we remain careful to pace our investments appropriately and in line with booking trends. We now have 85 cloud regions live, and another 77 planned with more to follow."

Ellison shared a tidbit of information about how the Oracle data centers function during the earnings call: "Every Oracle data center from the largest to the smallest are identical in features and functions, they only vary by scale. That means we have one suite of automation software that automates all of this. Nobody else does this. No one has that level of automation, that level of autonomy."

He added that the company has decided that "everything needs to move to autonomous" and that Oracle is currently migrating Fusion and NetSuite services to autonomous, citing cost savings and the removal of human error. This move has made their margins, according to Ellison, "stunningly high."