AI Dreams Lift Oracle and Tesla, While Kroger Doubts Sink Ocado

The CE 100 Index managed to tack on a slight 0.4%, trailing all broader benchmarks, as a majority of pillars finished in the green.

Oracle shares rocketed 25.5%, pushing the Work segment ahead by more than 1.1%.

Oracle reported strong Q1 FY26 results, with revenue up 11% year over year to $15.9 billion. Cloud services and license support revenue increased 14% to $11.7 billion, and the company highlighted surging demand for its cloud infrastructure, projecting accelerated growth in FY26. The stock’s jump was the largest rally seen in three decades for the tech bellwether. The company said Oracle revenue this fiscal year in the cloud infrastructure business gained as much as 77% to $18 billion.

In additional Oracle news, and as PYMNTS reported, the company’s new artificial intelligence-powered offerings are designed to simplify and lower the cost of processes such as prior authorizations, medical coding, claims processing and determining eligibility.

Annual administrative costs tied to healthcare billing and insurance are estimated at roughly $200 billion, Oracle said. That figure continues to rise, largely due to the complexity of medical and financial processing rules and evolving payment models. The rules and models are time-consuming and inefficient for providers to follow and adopt, so they use manual processes, which make them prone to errors.

Tesla’s stock jumped more than 12%, continuing to move higher after touching lows in the $220 range earlier this year, and on news of a possible $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk. Sites such as MSN noted that Wall Street sell-side analysts have been positive about the company’s robotics business.

Enablers, as a group, added 1.6%. Nvidia’s stock took an additional 6.5%, amid reports that the chip giant and OpenAI are in talks, as CNBC reported, that would include “backing a major investment in Britain focused on boosting artificial intelligence infrastructure in the country.”

Also within that group, Apple’s stock lost 2.3%. In PYMNTS coverage of the company’s latest product launches, Apple’s iPhone 17 launch leaned on hardware and chip performance, with artificial intelligence (AI) playing only a secondary role. Apple executives offered only passing mentions of Apple Intelligence, a shift from last year’s iPhone 16 debut, where AI dominated, before delays tempered expectations.

Features for the new iPhones were framed as AI enablers, we reported. Other AI features were not presented as breakthroughs. Apple pointed to tools such as live translation in Messages and FaceTime and visual recognition in Photos, many of which were first previewed over the summer.

Ocado Slips and Hits the Shopping Segment

Ocado’s stock dropped more than 21%, blunting the impact of the Work pillar’s gains, and dragged the Shop segment down by more than 2%. The stock declined after its U.S. partner, Kroger, announced a review of its automated warehouse strategy, raising concerns about the future of their collaboration, as Bloomberg noted. Kroger signaled it may shutter some facilities to improve profitability.

In the Pay and Be Paid sector, which slipped 1.5%, specialist payments orchestration platform Paytently launched an open banking partnership with Mastercard. Paytently Open Banking is an account-to-account payment option powered by Mastercard Open Finance, the companies said. Customers who use the option at checkout can pay directly from their bank, helping merchants increase conversion rates and improve cash flow. Mastercard shares lost 0.6% through the week.

Separately, PYMNTS reported that Visa and African digital payments network Onafriq partnered to launch the payments-as-a-service platform Visa Pay in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The partnership will give consumers in the DRC access to digital and eCommerce payments by enabling them to fund their Visa Pay wallets directly from mobile money channels.

The partnership also opens the door for Visa Pay to expand into other African markets, as Onafriq’s network spans 43 of those markets, according to the announcement. Visa shares were 1.1% lower.