Oracle Corp. shares gained the most since 1992 after the company gave an aggressive outlook for its cloud business, cementing the software maker’s place in the race to support demand for artificial intelligence computing.

The stock jumped more than 40% Wednesday mid-morning in New York, bringing its market valuation to $969 billion and making co-founder Larry Ellison the world’s richest person, surpassing Elon Musk.

Known for its database software, Oracle has recently found success in the red-hot cloud computing market and is emerging as a key provider of AI computing capacity, competing against cloud leaders Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Earlier this summer, it signed an unprecedented deal with ChatGPT operator OpenAI for 4.5 gigawatts’ worth of data cente

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