By Ashley Capoot,Jordan Novet,Russell Leung

Copyright cnbc

Oracle is promoting its presidents of cloud infrastructure, Clay Magouyrk, and industries, Mike Sicilia, to co-CEOs, the company announced Monday.

Safra Catz, the software giant’s current CEO, will serve as executive vice chair on the company board.

Larry Ellison will remain Oracle’s board chairman and chief technology officer. He has been active outside the company, helping to finance Skydance Media’s merger in August with CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global. The combined company, run by Ellison’s son, David, is now exploring an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNBC reported earlier this month.

Oracle has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence boom thanks to its cloud infrastructure business and its access to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are both needed to run large workloads. Oracle and other major cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are in a fierce competition for customers.

As Oracle’s cloud infrastructure president, Magouyrk led the development of its Gen2 platform. Sicilia oversaw Oracle’s applications for vertical businesses, from banking to retail.

“A few years ago, Clay and Mike committed Oracle’s Infrastructure and Applications businesses to AI—it’s paying off,” Oracle founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said in a statement.

Shares of the company rose 3% on Monday morning.

Oracle’s stock has surged 30% in the past month after its first-quarter earnings report projected massive cloud growth from the AI boom. Shares are up about 85% for the year.

The company said that its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, soared to $455 billion, up 359% from a year earlier. The company also reaffirmed its financial guidance on Monday.

“At this time of strength is the right moment to pass the CEO role to the next generation of capable executives,” Catz said in a statement.

For decades, Oracle grew by selling licenses to database software that stores and serve up data for a variety of processes inside companies. The company also fielded applications and middleware. In the early 2010s, with Amazon gaining a foothold in information technology with its cloud-based services for computing, storage and databases, Oracle set out to build its own cloud. It wasn’t immediately popular, prompting the company to bring out a second generation of infrastructure in 2018.

Oracle’s cloud picked up business from young technology companies TikTok and Zoom. The real momentum came after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, as Oracle sought to rent out Nvidia graphics chips for training and running AI models. It won business from cloud competitor Microsoft. More recently Oracle picked up a $300 billion contract from OpenAI over five years, starting in 2027.

On Monday, Oracle hinted at its corporate transformation toward AI-led cloud infrastructure, calling its webcast to announce the executive transition “AI Changes Everything.”