Oracle (ORCL) Q1 FY2027 10-Q: $288B Off-Balance-Sheet Data Center Leases and a $19.9B Stock Sale
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Oracle has signed $288B of data center leases that have not commenced and are not on its balance sheet, 4.3 times its fiscal 2026 revenue. In the quarter ended August 31, 2026 it spent $28.5B on capital expenditures, borrowed nothing new, and paid for the build with $19.9B of new stock and $11.4B of customer prepayments. Strip the prepayments out and free cash flow was negative $16.8B, the deepest of the last six quarters.
RoboSystems initiating coverage · Services-prepackaged software (SIC 7372) · Source filing: Form 10-Q for the quarter ended August 31, 2026, filed September 11, 2026 (accession 0001193125-26-389274, CIK 0001341439). Oracle's fiscal year ends May 31, so this quarter is the first quarter of fiscal 2027 in the filing's own words, and the comparison quarter is the first quarter of fiscal 2026 (June to August 2025). Series figures come from Oracle's FY2025 10-K (0000950170-25-087926), its three FY2026 10-Qs (0001193125-25-200095, 0001193125-25-315925, 0001193125-26-101045) and its FY2026 10-K (0001193125-26-277521). All figures read from the filings' XBRL and note text via RoboSystems unless attributed otherwise. Not investment advice. No price target.
1. The Hook
The biggest number in Oracle $ORCL's latest 10-Q is one sentence at the end of the lease note: "As of August 31, 2026, we had $288 billion of additional lease commitments, substantially all related to data center arrangements, that are generally expected to commence between the second quarter of fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2029 and for terms of fifteen to nineteen years that were not reflected on our condensed consolidated balance sheets."
Oracle's revenue for all of fiscal 2026 was $67.4B. The leases it has signed but not started are 4.3 times that. Microsoft prints the same kind of sentence, and at June 30, 2026 its figure was $329.1B against $331.8B of annual revenue, roughly one times. Oracle carries 88% of Microsoft's unstarted lease pile on about a fifth of Microsoft's revenue.
The second finding is what this quarter changed. Capital expenditures were $28.5B in three months, more than the $19.3B of revenue the quarter produced. Oracle issued no new debt, repaid $4.2B, and funded the gap with $19.9B of common stock sold through an at-the-market program and $11.4B of customer prepayments booked as operating cash. Fiscal 2026 was built with $46.1B of new bonds and term loans. The first quarter of fiscal 2027 was built with shareholders and customers.
2. Company Snapshot
Oracle sells database and middleware software, cloud applications, and, increasingly, cloud infrastructure: rented compute capacity inside data centers it builds and leases. Cloud revenue (infrastructure plus applications) was $11.6B in the quarter, 60% of the total. Cloud infrastructure alone was $7.39B, up 120.7% from $3.35B a year earlier, while the legacy software line fell 3.0% to $5.55B.
Everything below comes from the 10-Q for the quarter ended August 31, 2026 unless another Oracle filing is named. The company's September 10, 2026 earnings release (8-K Exhibit 99.1) is cited where used, and labeled. Since the 10-Q, one further 8-K (September 14, 2026) disclosed that Oracle's Executive Chair and Chief Technology Officer cancelled a 10b5-1 plan to sell Oracle stock, and that no shares were sold under it.
3. The Financial Story
The series nobody lines up. Oracle has tagged its not-yet-commenced lease commitments in each of its last six periodic filings. Lined up, the figure did not accelerate the way Microsoft's did. It exploded a year ago and has not drained since.
| Balance date | Leases not yet commenced | Lease liabilities on balance sheet | Remaining performance obligations |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 31, 2025 (FY2025 10-K) | $43.4B | $16.4B | $137.8B |
| Aug 31, 2025 (Q1 FY2026 10-Q) | $99.8B | $20.3B | $455.3B |
| Nov 30, 2025 (Q2 FY2026 10-Q) | $248B | $23.7B | $523.3B |
| Feb 28, 2026 (Q3 FY2026 10-Q) | $261B | $27.6B | $552.6B |
| May 31, 2026 (FY2026 10-K) | $260B | $37.9B | $638B |
| Aug 31, 2026 (Q1 FY2027 10-Q) | $288B | $43.8B | $664B |
Lease liabilities are operating plus finance lease liabilities. Not-yet-commenced figures are Oracle's element orcl:LesseeOperatingLeaseLeaseNotYetCommencedLeaseCommitments; backlog is us-gaap:RevenueRemainingPerformanceObligation.
The pile went from $43.4B to $248B in six months, 5.7 times. The single quarter ended November 30, 2025 added $148.2B, larger than the $132.5B jump Microsoft reported for its quarter ended June 30, 2026. Then it held: $261B, $260B, and now $288B. Holding flat is not the same as standing still. From November 30, 2025 to August 31, 2026, while the pile moved from $248B to $288B, lease liabilities actually recorded on the balance sheet nearly doubled, from $23.7B to $43.8B, as leases commenced and moved onto the balance sheet. A pile that stays level while leases keep commencing is a pile that is being refilled. The 10-Q says so directly: "During the first quarter of fiscal 2027, we entered into certain significant leases for data centers." The terms lengthened too. The FY2025 10-K and the August 2025 10-Q described terms of ten to sixteen years. Every filing since November 2025 says fifteen to nineteen.
Add the leases already running, $48.1B of undiscounted operating lease payments and $15.2B of finance lease payments, and Oracle's total committed lease payments are roughly $351B, against $43.8B of lease liabilities recognized. Unconditional purchase obligations, mainly component supply for cloud infrastructure and data center power, rose from $13.3B at May 31, 2026 to $34.15B at August 31, 2026, after Oracle entered into $19B of new five-year commitments for cloud infrastructure assets subsequent to May 31 (FY2026 10-K). Leases not yet started, leases running and purchase commitments together come to about $385B before counting $125.3B of notes payable and borrowings.
The backlog runs shorter than the leases. Remaining performance obligations were $664B at August 31, 2026. Oracle expects to recognize about 13% in the next twelve months (roughly $86B), 37% in months 13 to 36, 34% in months 37 to 60, and the remaining 16% after that. So 84% of the contracted backlog is scheduled to turn into revenue within five years. The leases that house it run fifteen to nineteen years, and the servers inside them depreciate over six (FY2026 10-K). The backlog also slowed sharply in this quarter: it rose $26B, from $638B to $664B, against a $317.5B increase in the same quarter a year earlier. The earnings release says Oracle "booked more than $30 billion of additional AI cloud contracts in Q1."
The quarter's cash, with and without the prepayments. Operating cash flow was $23.1B, up from $8.1B. Of that, $11.4B was a new cash flow line, "increase in deferred revenues from customer prepayments with significant financing component." Oracle received $4.6B of such prepayments in all of fiscal 2026 (the FY2026 10-K), none in fiscal 2025 or 2024, and the nine-month cash flow statement in the February 2026 10-Q carries no such line, so the flow began in the quarter ended May 31, 2026 and more than doubled in the next one. Total deferred revenue doubled in a quarter, to $30.8B from $15.4B, and the non-current portion rose from $5.5B to $16.1B. This is correct GAAP: a customer paying more than a year ahead for capacity is operating cash. It is also cash for service not yet delivered, which Oracle will later recognize as revenue without collecting it again, and the filing does not name the customers.
Without the prepayments, operating cash of $11.7B covered 41% of capex. Here is the build, quarter by quarter:
| Quarter ended | Capex | Operating cash flow | of which prepayments | Free cash flow ex-prepayments | New debt | New equity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31, 2025 (Q1 FY26) | $8.5B | $8.1B | $0 | -$0.4B | $0 | $0 |
| Nov 30, 2025 (Q2 FY26) | $12.0B | $2.1B | $0 | -$10.0B | $17.9B | $0 |
| Feb 28, 2026 (Q3 FY26) | $18.6B | $7.2B | $0 | -$11.5B | $26.7B | $5.0B preferred |
| May 31, 2026 (Q4 FY26) | $16.5B | $14.6B | $4.6B | -$6.5B | $1.5B | $0 |
| Aug 31, 2026 (Q1 FY27) | $28.5B | $23.1B | $11.4B | -$16.8B | $0 | $19.9B common |
Quarterly figures for Q2 to Q4 FY2026 are derived by subtracting year-to-date totals in successive 10-Qs and the 10-K. New debt is proceeds from senior notes, term loans and other borrowings. Employee stock program proceeds are excluded from new equity. The quarter ended May 31, 2025, not shown, had free cash flow of -$2.9B.
Two things stand out. Reported free cash flow of -$5.4B looks like an improvement on the -$11.5B of two quarters earlier, but excluding customer prepayments this was the deepest quarter in the table. And over the trailing twelve months capex was $75.7B against $71.8B of revenue: Oracle spent more on property and equipment than it took in as revenue.
The funding switch has a cost of its own. The at-the-market program, entered February 2, 2026 and amended June 23, 2026, was "fully utilized" in the quarter: 141 million shares for net proceeds of $19.9B, about $141 per share by calculation. Shares outstanding rose 5.0%, from 2,880M to 3,024M, in a single quarter, and total stockholders' equity rose from $43.1B to $67.2B. The 6.50% Series D mandatory convertible preferred issued in February 2026 adds another 25.0M to 31.2M common shares when it converts on January 15, 2029 (50,000 preferred shares at 499.8126 to 624.7657 common shares each, per the FY2026 10-K). Borrowings fell $4.2B, to $125.3B. Cash and cash equivalents rose to $36.4B, plus $2.6B of restricted cash that was immaterial at May 31, 2026.
The margin story is narrower than the headline. Revenue rose 29.6% to $19.35B, operating income rose 57.3% to $6.73B, net income rose 62.6% to $4.76B, and diluted EPS went from $1.01 to $1.56. Operating margin widened from 28.7% to 34.8%. But inside Oracle's own segment reporting, the cloud and software segment's margin fell from 59.6% to 54.5% as the segment's direct cloud and software expenses rose 82.4% against 32.9% segment revenue growth. Depreciation rose to $3.16B from $1.35B, and interest expense rose 54.7% to $1.43B. The consolidated margin widened because costs outside the segments fell: amortization of intangibles dropped $218M and restructuring and other dropped $321M, together $539M, or 22% of the $2.45B operating income increase. That second tailwind looks set to reverse: subsequent to August 31, 2026, management supplemented its 2026 Restructuring Plan by about $700M, on top of up to $2.1B estimated for the plan as of quarter end.
4. Valuation: What It Is Worth as a Normal Business
Where it trades. Oracle closed at $140.35 on September 15, 2026 (market data via stockanalysis.com, not from the filing). Against the 3,023,736,000 shares on the 10-Q cover as of September 7, 2026, market capitalization is $424.4B. Adding notes payable and borrowings of $125.3B, finance lease liabilities of $9.2B and the $5.0B preferred, less $37.1B of cash and marketable securities, gives an enterprise value of roughly $526.8B. That excludes operating leases and all $288B of commitments not yet started. On trailing twelve-month figures: 5.9 times revenue of $71.8B, 7.3 times on enterprise value, and 22.0 times diluted EPS of about $6.38 (fiscal 2026's $5.83 plus this quarter's $1.56, less last year's first quarter $1.01). The company's own non-GAAP EPS guidance of $8.10 for fiscal 2027 (earnings release) puts the stock at 17.3 times that figure. Trailing free cash flow was -$28.7B, so there is no free cash flow yield to quote.
Scenario discounted cash flow. With negative free cash flow today, every scenario is a bet on when capital intensity falls. Each case models fiscal 2027 to fiscal 2031 explicitly (free cash flow = operating cash flow less capex, Oracle's own definition, with stock compensation not deducted), then a terminal value, discounted from September 2026, less $102.4B of net debt, finance leases and preferred. Fiscal 2027 revenue in each case brackets the company's guidance of "at least $90 billion."
| Scenario | FY2031 revenue (CAGR from FY2026) | Operating cash margin | Capex, FY2027 to FY2031 | WACC | Terminal growth | Implied value per share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bear | $142B (16.1%) | 37-38% | $85B falling to $28B | 9.5% | 2.5% | ~$34 |
| Base | $178B (21.5%) | 40-42% | $85B falling to $38B | 9.0% | 3.0% | ~$99 |
| Bull | $220B (26.7%) | 42-46% | $80B falling to $38B | 8.5% | 3.5% | ~$279 |
| Current price | $140.35 |
Implied value under stated assumptions. Not a price target and not investment advice. Operating cash margins sit near fiscal 2026's 40.7% excluding prepayments; the bear case assumes fixed lease costs outrun slower revenue.
In the bear and base cases the terminal value exceeds the entire enterprise value, and in the bull case it is 94% of it, because the explicit years burn cash. On the base revenue path, today's price requires about $47B of free cash flow in fiscal 2031, a 26% free cash flow margin, against the base case's $36.8B. The market is paying for something between the base and bull cases: the backlog converting on schedule and capex falling by more than half within four years. As a cross-check, Microsoft closed at $497.12 on September 15, 2026 (stockanalysis.com), 27.7 times its $17.95 fiscal 2026 diluted EPS from its 10-K. Oracle at that multiple would be about $177. Microsoft, however, generates positive free cash flow, and Oracle's trailing free cash flow is negative $28.7B.
5. Risks
The duration mismatch is the structural one: $288B of leases with fifteen to nineteen year terms sit behind a backlog 84% of which is expected to convert within five years. The FY2026 10-K warns that "our profitability and revenues could be adversely impacted if we lose one or more of our key customers for any reason," including "insolvency, bankruptcy or other issues impacting their creditworthiness." The same risk factors say a credit downgrade "could also reduce our access to, or increase the cost of, commercial paper or other short-term financing, affect the terms or availability of certain long-term commitments (including data center leases)" and "increase collateral, letter of credit or other credit support requirements." The FY2026 10-K also disclosed that the lease commitments included one lease for which Oracle "guaranteed up to $3.3 billion of the lessor's borrowing, which matures in September 2026"; the August 10-Q does not repeat a figure.
Oracle's senior notes and other borrowings had a fair value of $105.7B against a $125.0B carrying amount at August 31, 2026, a wider gap than May 31, 2026's $114.4B against $128.1B. Fixed-rate notes issued at low coupons trade below par when rates rise, so this can reflect rates as much as credit, and the filing does not say which. A putative securities class action concerning statements about Oracle's cloud infrastructure business, filed February 3, 2026 and amended July 14, 2026, is pending; Oracle says it does not expect a material impact. The restructuring plan was expanded by about $700M after quarter end.
6. The Bottom Line
Oracle is a revenue growth story with a funding question it is answering in public. Cloud infrastructure more than doubled, the backlog is $664B, and reported earnings rose faster than revenue. Underneath, the core segment's margin compressed five points, operating cash excluding prepayments covered 41% of the quarter's capex, and the company has $288B of leases waiting to start. The notable change is the funding source: fiscal 2026 ran on $46.1B of new debt, and the first quarter of fiscal 2027 ran on $19.9B of new stock and $11.4B of customer money, with debt paid down.
Watch four lines in the next 10-Q: whether the not-yet-commenced lease figure grows again or finally starts to drain; whether the backlog resumes growth faster than the $26B it added this quarter; whether customer prepayments recur, since they are the difference between -$5.4B and -$16.8B of free cash flow; and whether a new at-the-market program replaces the one Oracle has already fully used.
Every figure above was read out of Oracle's SEC filings via RoboSystems, from the filings' own XBRL facts and note text, except the September 15, 2026 share prices for Oracle and Microsoft, which are market data and attributed as such, and figures labeled as from Oracle's September 10, 2026 earnings release. Microsoft's lease and EPS figures come from its FY2026 10-K (0001193125-26-323660) and March 2026 10-Q (0001193125-26-191507). Nobody wrote this by hand: the six-point lease series came from reading the same tagged sentence in six Oracle filings, the same pipeline reads that line for any company that files with the SEC, and a private company reporting in the same format is the same job.