Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) stock is down roughly 3% over the past 12 months, while Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) has cratered 55%, compared to the S&P 500’s gains of 16%.
Both companies have made substantial moves into artificial intelligence, and some of those efforts are already producing tangible results for investors to evaluate.
Oracle’s capital expenditures soared 235% in the first quarter to $28.5 billion, fueling growing shareholder concern that building expensive AI data centers may not justify the cost.
The company is constructing a massive new data center in New Mexico, known as Project Jupiter, which carries a total projected cost of $165 billion and is expected to be completed by late 2028.
Oracle recently paused rent payments on the project after permitting delays and power supply issues slowed construction progress, rattling investors who were already skeptical of the company’s aggressive spending.
Those setbacks sent Oracle’s stock tumbling further, deepening concerns about whether the company’s capital-intensive AI strategy will deliver returns proportional to its enormous financial commitments.
Despite those headwinds, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales more than doubled in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, offering concrete evidence that its strategy of renting AI compute power to clients is gaining meaningful traction.
Salesforce, meanwhile, has overhauled its customer relationship management software by integrating AI agents and pivoting away from a traditional paid-seat pricing model toward a usage-based one.
Software-as-a-service companies broadly face pressure from AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, which can now perform many tasks that were once the exclusive domain of specialized enterprise software platforms.
Salesforce’s approach of embedding AI into existing legacy software gives some enterprise clients a more comfortable upgrade path, rather than forcing a wholesale replacement with AI-first alternatives.
Crucially, Salesforce is not committing to the same scale of capital expenditure that Oracle is, making its AI transition considerably less financially risky for shareholders at this stage.
While Oracle’s long-term potential remains real, Salesforce currently holds the edge in this matchup, offering investors a lower-risk path to enterprise AI exposure with fewer execution uncertainties attached.
