05:05 PM EDT, 03/11/2024 (MT Newswires) -- Oracle (ORCL) late Monday reported stronger-than-expected fiscal third-quarter earnings as cloud demand continued to grow.

Adjusted per-share earnings rose to $1.41 in the three months ended Feb. 29 from $1.22 a year earlier, higher than the Capital IQ-polled consensus of $1.38. Revenue advanced 7% year over year to $13.28 billion, but narrowly missed Wall Street's $13.29 billion view.

The software maker's shares were up almost 10% in after-hours activity.

Oracle's total remaining performance obligations surged 29% to an all-time high of more than $80 billion, driven by "large new cloud infrastructure contracts," Chief Executive Safra Catz said in a statement.

"We expect to continue receiving large contracts reserving cloud infrastructure capacity because the demand for our Gen2 (artificial intelligence) infrastructure substantially exceeds supply -- despite the fact we are opening new and expanding existing cloud datacenters very, very rapidly," Catz said.

Cloud services and license support sales gained 12% to $9.96 billion, while the cloud and on-premise license segment fell 3% to $1.26 billion. Both hardware and services logged declines, according to Oracle.

"We expect that 43% of our current $80 billion of remaining performance obligations will be recognized as revenue over the next four quarters, and that our Gen2 cloud infrastructure business will remain in a hyper-growth phase -- up 53% in (the third quarter) -- for the foreseeable future," Catz said.

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