New York, February 19, 2026, 11:45 EST — Regular session
- Oracle shares are up roughly 1% in late-morning trading, building on Wednesday’s advance.
- Data-center power supply grabbed headlines again following new details of a long-term DTE Energy agreement linked to an Oracle facility.
- Oracle’s next quarterly update is coming up in March, and investors are eyeing it for clues about cloud demand and spending trends.
Oracle Corp (ORCL) climbed roughly 1.1% to $157.93 late Thursday morning. The move stretched a rebound into its third day, following a sharp pullback earlier this week.
The stock is now standing in for a larger debate on Wall Street — can the breakneck pace of artificial intelligence data center construction get past a stubborn hurdle: power. According to a Washington Post piece Thursday, Silicon Valley firms are moving forward with their own off-grid or exclusive power solutions as traditional utilities lag behind.
Even standard electricity supply updates are drawing attention in this environment. DTE Energy inked a long-term deal to deliver 1.4 gigawatts of power for Oracle’s planned Saline Township data center in Michigan, with Oracle on the hook for the full bill, Barron’s noted. Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith put it plainly: “The quality of the offtaker matters.” Barron’s
Oracle shares climbed 1.43% to close at $156.17 on Wednesday, outpacing both Microsoft and Alphabet as U.S. stocks advanced, MarketWatch reported. Still, the stock is roughly 55% off its 52-week high, per MarketWatch data.
DTE’s utility arm landed conditional approval for special power deals with the Washtenaw County data center back in December, according to Reuters. Michigan regulators instructed DTE to shield other customers from picking up extra costs tied to these contracts, while also mandating that the company cut electricity to the data center first if emergency conditions force service interruptions.
Oracle is making moves to address local worries over land, water, and energy use. In a blog post Tuesday, the company said about 75% of the Saline Township campus would stay as farmland, wetlands, or open space. Oracle also emphasized that it “pay[s] our own way on energy,” adding that “ratepayers’ bills and electric grid reliability are never impacted.” Oracle
Questions remain over how Oracle will come up with the cash for its expansion. Earlier this month, Oracle outlined plans to pull in $45 billion to $50 billion in 2026, tapping a mix of debt and stock sales to ramp up its cloud infrastructure. Investors have been uneasy about the scale of spending needed for its OpenAI-linked data center build. “The perception is that Oracle’s fortunes are now heavily tied to OpenAI,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell. Reuters
Concerns resurfaced in December when Oracle came up short on forecasts, falling below Wall Street expectations and signaling higher capital expenditures for fiscal 2026—think more spending on data centers and gear. “The current weakness is more capex investment cycles needed to support demand,” BofA Global Research analysts said then. Reuters
Power and permits are still the bottlenecks. If there are holdups, pushback from towns, or grid costs balloon, returns could take longer to materialize. Then if cloud demand slips, investors start to doubt how quickly Oracle can fill out fresh capacity and keep margins intact.
Traders are eyeing Oracle’s performance versus bigger cloud names, especially now that corporate AI budgets are moving out of trial phases and into real deployments. The stock hasn’t had much patience—any hint that infrastructure spending is racing ahead of short-term revenue tends to get punished, despite management insisting those investments are necessary.
Oracle is scheduled to report quarterly results on March 9, per Yahoo Finance’s earnings calendar, setting up the next crucial update for investors tracking the company’s growth outlook and spending plans.
