Now, the success of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure unit is why the company’s stock price has soared and made Ellison, its chairman and co-founder, the second-richest person in the world. Oracle, a software company that had long struggled to find its niche in this market, gained a foothold through scoring major customers. Today, it’s helping power Elon Musk’s xAI from a data center in Utah, assembling a cluster of tens of thousands of AI chips for Nvidia Corp. near Singapore and recently inked what is likely the largest single cloud deal ever with OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence company.