Oracle’s AI Cloud Shockwave Sends Wall Street Into Overdrive — Startups Ride the Tailwind, Tokens Chase Utility

Oracle just flipped the power script with an AI fueled earnings bombshell that lit up Wall Street. As legacy software meets hyperscale AI, public markets hit record highs, VCs doubled down on deep infra bets, and even tokens tried to shed their speculation skin. The AI economy isn’t cooling down, it’s leveling up.

📈 AI Market Movers & Trends

Oracle just crashed the AI party, and turned it into a gala.

Shares of Oracle (ORCL) rocketed 13% after the company blew away earnings expectations, thanks in large part to a colossal surge in demand for its cloud infrastructure built to support AI workloads. The numbers weren’t subtle, Cloud revenue jumped 48% year over year, led by new deals with AI titans and major enterprise upgrades.

CEO Larry Ellison looked more like a techno king than a software CEO, touting that Oracle now powers many of the “world’s most powerful” AI companies. There’s some serious truth behind the bluster, Oracle recently landed a multi billion dollar cloud infrastructure deal with Elon Musk’s xAI and reportedly with OpenAI as well.

This isn’t a sideshow. Oracle’s unexpected cloud credibility has spooked AWS and put Azure on alert. Add to that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closing at record highs, and you’ve got an AI fueled euphoria pulling the entire market upward.

Also catching tailwinds, Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO) popped 4% and 3% respectively, riding enthusiasm that Oracle will pour even more cash into the silicon arms race. But don’t sleep on Synopsys (SNPS), which stumbled 5% even with AI tailwinds, as investors question whether software for chip design can scale like chips and clouds themselves.

Wall Street’s takeaway? Legacy tech with AI execution is turning from punchline into power play. Oracle’s quarter wasn’t just a win, it was a statement, don’t underestimate the old guard when it's armed with new code.

💸 Funding Watch

While Oracle flexed in the public arena, startups updated their pitch decks overnight, and VCs opened the checkbooks.

Infra first AI startups are on fire right now. Two notable players, Laminar and Vectara, announced fresh rounds this week, closing $110M and $75M respectively. Laminar’s Series B was led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from Sequoia and Nvidia’s NVentures, that last one should raise eyebrows, given Nvidia’s chip dominance and increasing desire to own the AI stack, top to bottom.

Laminar builds workload aware deployment orchestration for large scale AI models, think Kubernetes, but optimized for trillion parameter hellscapes. Vectara, meanwhile, is tackling search 2.0 with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques that enterprises are scrambling to adopt.

What’s the thread here? Post ChatGPT, VCs are realizing that differentiated infra is the pickaxe, not just the gold. Infra startups used to be hard sells. Now? They’re the darlings of Sand Hill, thanks to hyperscaler demand and the GPU bottleneck domino effect.

Another interesting shift, AI native companies are acquiring, not just fundraising. ElevenLabs, the audio AI phenom, quietly bought Voicify.ai in an all stock deal aimed at expanding its synthetic media toolkit. The move echoes OpenAI buying Global Illumination last year, midsize AI companies are getting aggressive before they get swallowed themselves.

Don’t be surprised if every AI infra round this fall turns into a future IPO pipeline driver. Oracle’s big day just added fuel to that fire.

🪙 Crypto Moves

Crypto wants into the AI game, but today showed just how tricky that really is.

Fetch.ai (FET), one of the more prominent AI adjacent tokens, spiked nearly 22% after teasing an “enterprise grade decentralized agent network” for AI apps. Hype sentence? Sure. But the speculative frenzy is real. Tokens like FET, Numeraire (NMR), and AGIX all popped as Telegram traders made the Oracle AI connection and started scouring for “the next AI breakout.”

Problem is, most of these tokens aren’t plugged into real world AI compute or infrastructure, they’re still betting on future utility. That's why savvy traders should be eyeing newer integrations, not just charts. One to watch, Ocean Protocol quietly announced a partnership with startup Nomic AI to distribute AI model training data via blockchain rails, with plans to incentivize labeling via Ocean tokens. This has legs, especially with enterprise AI hungrier than ever for high quality datasets.

Worth noting, investment firm a16z, which backed both Ocean Protocol and several of today’s hot AI infra startups, is clearly orchestrating a parallel thesis in AI x Crypto convergence. They don’t just want decentralized AI, they want ownable layers inside it.

In short, the market is still separating AI washed tokens from actual AI aligned projects. Expect more volatility, and more fakeouts, until utility catches up with narrative. But today’s activity shows crypto still believes AI can be its redemption arc.

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