New York, Feb 18, 2026, 13:22 EST — Regular session
- Oracle shares moved higher in midday trading, as U.S. tech stocks made a broader push upward.
- A prominent hedge fund upped its stake in Oracle, according to its most recent quarterly holdings filing.
- Fed minutes drop later Wednesday, while Oracle’s next earnings are due by mid-March—both on traders’ radar.
Oracle Corp was up 1.9% at $156.88 by midday Wednesday. Shares moved in a range from $151.55 to $157.29 during the session, with about 7.7 million changing hands.
Big tech and cloud stocks are finding the rebound choppy. Oracle is now standing in for a pair of stubborn questions—when, exactly, AI demand shows up in the numbers, and what the bill comes to for scaling up to handle it.
Rate bets are adding to the mix. The Federal Reserve’s January meeting minutes drop at 2 p.m. EST, a release that tends to serve as a quick gut check for growth stocks, especially with the path for borrowing costs still unsettled. After that meeting, Fed Chair Jerome Powell noted there was “broad support” to keep the policy rate in the 3.5% to 3.75% band. (Reuters)
Tech stocks bounced back, clawing back part of their declines from earlier this month. “Investors are still trying to sort winners and losers in AI,” said Paul Stanley, chief investment officer at Granite Bay Wealth Management. Shares of Nvidia advanced after the company disclosed a multi-year agreement to supply Meta Platforms with millions of both current and future AI chips, boosting the mood around megacap tech. (Reuters)
Adage Capital Partners bumped up its Oracle position by nearly 19% in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to 1.87 million shares—worth around $365 million as of year-end, according to separate regulatory filings. The 13F forms provide a look at major investors’ holdings as of Dec. 31 and don’t include any trades made after that date. (Reuters)
Oracle’s aggressive data-center expansion is making waves beyond just its share price. DTE Energy flagged a major agreement to deliver 1.4 gigawatts of power to Oracle’s upcoming Saline Township, Michigan facility—a deal that stretches to February 2045, with options on the table for extensions. Oracle, notably, will shoulder all electricity expenses. Jefferies’ Julien Dumoulin-Smith pointed out that “the quality of the offtaker matters” as utilities compete to land data-center contracts. (Barron’s)
Oracle shares have drawn increased attention after the company rolled out its plan to secure $45 billion to $50 billion in gross proceeds in calendar 2026, aiming to fuel expansion of its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The proposed financing package blends both debt and equity, with Oracle specifying that up to $20 billion of the equity could come from a new at-the-market program—allowing the firm to gradually sell shares into the market. (Oracle Investor Relations)
Oracle’s cloud arm leases out computing muscle and storage, going head-to-head with Amazon.com’s AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud. The stock often reacts quickly to hints that major clients are either snapping up more capacity or pulling back—far more so than in Oracle’s traditional software segment, which moves at a steadier pace.
Still, dilution risk hangs over the funding plan, while whether all that data-center investment pays off remains to be seen. If the Fed minutes come in hawkish, Treasury yields could bump up, putting rate-sensitive tech names under strain—even if Oracle keeps its head down.
Right now, traders are watching for the Fed minutes, which drop at 2 p.m. EST, to see how rate cut bets may shift. For Oracle, eyes turn to its fiscal third-quarter earnings, with the company flagging a mid-March release. (Oracle Investor Relations)
