Oracle reports its first quarter of fiscal 2027 after the close on Thursday 10 September, with the call at 4:00 p.m. Central. The quarter ended 31 August 2026.
The consensus is unusually uninformative this time, and that is the point. Press-reported feeds have $1.74 of non-GAAP earnings per share on $19.13 billion of revenue. Oracle guided the same quarter on 10 June to non-GAAP EPS of $1.72 to $1.76 in USD and revenue growth of 27% to 29% — which on the $14.926 billion it earned a year ago is $18.96bn to $19.26bn. The Street has landed inside management's range on both lines.
When the sell side simply restates the guide, the headline numbers stop being the question. What is left is the three things Oracle guides loosely or not at all: how fast the backlog is still growing, how much it is spending to service it, and what that does to cash.
[[article-chart:consensus]]
The backlog is the number that moved the stock last time
Oracle ended the May quarter with remaining performance obligations of $638 billion, up 363% year over year and $85 billion sequentially from $553 billion at the end of Q3. That is the figure the AI story rests on, and it is disclosed quarterly rather than guided.
RPO is a contracted backlog, not revenue. The distance between the two is the whole argument about Oracle right now: $638 billion of obligations against $67.4 billion of fiscal 2026 revenue is roughly nine and a half years of the current run-rate, and converting it needs data centres that do not exist yet.
The spending against it is already visible in the cash flow
Fiscal 2026 capital expenditure was $55.7 billion, against $21.2 billion the year before. Operating cash flow was $32.0 billion. Subtract one from the other and Oracle's free cash flow for the year was about negative $23.7 billion — and our stored series carries the May quarter at −$1.9 billion.
That gap is funded, not absorbed. The fiscal 2026 cash-flow statement shows $46.1 billion of net proceeds from senior notes, term loans and other borrowings, plus $3.3 billion of short-term financing related to capital expenditures. This is a company borrowing to build ahead of contracted demand, which works precisely as long as the demand stays contracted.
What to watch
- RPO, and how much of the increase is one customer. The May quarter added $85 billion. Oracle said most of that increase came from a small number of large contracts; the concentration matters more than the total, because a backlog resting on a few counterparties is a different asset from one spread across hundreds.
- Whether total cloud revenue lands in the guided 58% to 64% USD growth band. This is the line that converts backlog into revenue, and the one place the guide is specific.
- Capital expenditure for the quarter, and any change to the full-year plan. Fiscal 2026 ran $55.7 billion. A step up from there is the clearest signal that the contracted demand is real; a step down would say something about the pace of conversion.
- Free cash flow, and how the gap was financed. Negative is expected. The question is the size and whether it is funded with more senior notes.
- Whether the full-year guide moves. Oracle confirmed $90 billion of fiscal 2027 revenue and raised non-GAAP EPS guidance to $8.05 on 10 June. Both were set before this quarter's bookings.
- The gap between GAAP and non-GAAP. The May quarter reported GAAP EPS of $1.45 against non-GAAP of $2.11 — and that $2.11 included one-time investment gains, without which it was $2.03. A quarter with no such gains is a cleaner read on the underlying line.
Oracle's report date and 4:00 p.m. Central call time are from its own notice of 2 September 2026. The Q1 FY2027 guidance, the fiscal 2027 revenue and non-GAAP EPS guides, the $638 billion RPO and its growth, the $85 billion sequential increase, fiscal 2026 revenue, capital expenditure, operating cash flow and financing proceeds, and the $1.45 GAAP and $2.11 non-GAAP EPS with the $2.03 ex-items figure are all from Oracle's fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2026 release of 10 June 2026. The $1.47 prior-year non-GAAP EPS is from its first-quarter fiscal 2026 release of 9 September 2025. Prior-quarter and prior-year revenue and the negative free cash flow for the May quarter are as stored here from those releases. The consensus is press-reported from third-party estimate feeds and is neither stored nor verified by this site; Nasdaq publishes an EPS consensus for Oracle on a different basis, which is why it is not the figure above. Derived here: the revenue band implied by the growth guide, the implied moves against the prior and year-ago quarters, and the fiscal 2026 free-cash-flow figure.
