Hi! Thin, different… The biggest reveal from Apple’s event yesterday wasn’t a 42-hour-battery-life Apple Watch, nor was it AirPods with AI-powered live translation — it was the brand-new iPhone Air, with a depth measuring 5.6 mm thick (about three nickels thick). Today we’re exploring:

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Oracle’s insane cloud infrastructure forecast has shades of Nvidia’s data center business

Yesterday, Oracle posted arguably the most remarkable quarter of any tech giant this year, sending the stock up as much as 40% in early trading Wednesday morning. Actually, the quarter itself was unremarkable — it was the forecast for what’s to come that completely blew analysts away.

Not a household name like Google, Apple, or Amazon, Oracle has a selection of different specialties, providing software, servers, and cloud services to global businesses.

That cloud portion — historically, not a major driver of the company’s bottom line — is where Oracle is seeing growth explode, with the company expecting its “Cloud Infrastructure” revenue to rise to an eye-watering $144 billion in its fiscal year 2030. That’s up more than 14x on last fiscal year’s ~$10 billion haul.

As hockey-stick revenue projections go, that’s about as bold as they come in terms of sheer scale. If — and it is an if — the company hits that forecast, it will have shades of another AI enabler’s meteoric rise: Nvidia’s data center business, which saw its revenue increase from $6.7 billion in FY 2021 to $115 billion in FY 2025, with analysts anticipating more than $184 billion in data center revenue this fiscal year.

For now, the insane revenue backlog that Oracle revealed, which was up 359% to $455 billion, is enough to lift entire AI space.

At the time of writing, Oracle’s shares are ~40% higher, putting the company’s market cap north of $900 billion. That’s just seen Larry Ellison, Oracle’s cofounder, overtake Elon Musk as the world’s richest person, with $70 billion added to his fortune.

Pacaso is bringing down the barriers to America’s favorite investment

For 3 out of 4 US adults, sharing costs of a vacation home would make them more likely to move from browsing to buying.¹ No surprises there.

That comes as real estate cements its place as American’s favorite long-term investment for the 12th year running, ahead of stocks, gold, and savings accounts.

So it’s also no surprise that vacation home ownership is a $1.3T market.² Pacaso is tapping into it.

Founded by former Zillow exec Austin Allison, Pacaso fuses cutting-edge property tech with a decades-old practice: co-ownership. Having enabled 2000+ users to buy ⅛ to ½ of a luxury vacation home, Pacaso’s platform lowers the barrier to access for the coveted vacation home market — generating $1B+ in gross real estate transactions and associated service fees since it started.

Pacaso’s offering is open to investment at $2.90/share, but not for much longer.³

The gap between America’s notion of the ideal family size and the actual reality is getting wider

While much is written about declining birth rates in the US, Asia, and around the world more broadly, over two-thirds of Americans are still envisioning a dream family with between two and three children, according to recent Gallup data. 

Since 1936, the American polling and analytics company has asked US adults what they think is the “ideal number of children” for a family. Back then, the average response was 3.6 children, before dropping slightly during the Second World War. In July of this year, when Gallup asked the same question, the average ideal number of children worked out as 2.7 — after 40% of respondents said two, 27% said three, and 15% said 4+ children was their “ideal.” 

Unsurprisingly, though, none of those answers line up with the current birthrate.

Even as the American fertility rate dropped to 1.6 births per woman last year — the lowest on record, and falling below the generally accepted replacement rate of 2.1 — the ideal family in the collective American consciousness has still risen modestly from 2.4 in the late 1990s. As Gallup pointed out, the data suggests that the nation’s falling fertility rate has more to do with practical issues that would-be parents face, rather than shifting attitudes towards having children or the traditional family unit.

Parental guidance

Since 2007, when the fertility rate last sat at that 2.1 replacement level, there have been a lot of external influences playing on potential parents, which may have swayed their decision to have kids one way or another. Costs associated with child rearing, such as the rising price of child care; the economic hardship that current parents increasingly say they’re facing; and the financial toll pregnancy and motherhood could take on the ever-growing female working population are all factors.

Read this on the web instead

64% would consider a second home if they could split the cost of ownership.¹ That’s the $1.3T market² Pacaso is disrupting with a fully-managed co-ownership model — and until 9/18, Pacaso is open to investors at $2.90/share.³ 

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