Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., Sept. 9, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
S&P 500 futures rose Wednesday, boosted by a positive forecast from Oracle, as traders looked ahead to the release of new inflation data.
Futures tied to the broad benchmark added 0.3%, as did Nasdaq 100 futures. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 78 points, or 0.2%.
Shares of Oracle surged more than 30% after the tech old guard reported that multicloud database revenue from Amazon, Google and Microsoft grew at the eye-popping rate of 1,529% in its last quarter, fueled by demand for AI servers. Investors were encouraged by the upbeat cloud forecast even as the latest earnings fell short.
“We signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in Q1,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said. “It was an astonishing quarter — and demand for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure continues to build.”
Nvidia and AMD were also higher in the premarket, as investors appeared to pile into the artificial intelligence trade once again.
But traders will stay on their toes as they await the the latest producer price index reading. This report, alongside Thursday’s more closely watched consumer price index reading, will offer more insight on the state of inflation in the U.S. economy.
Economists expect the report to show monthly increases of 0.3% across the board, according to Dow Jones. This includes both the headline all-items indexes, as well as the core readings that exclude volatile food and energy prices. If this materializes, it would push the annual headline CPI rate to 2.9%, while the core reading is expected to stay unchanged at 3.1%.
If these numbers come in around their estimates, all should go according to plan for the Federal Reserve to deliver another rate cut at its September meeting, said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management.
“In general, the inflation news over the next couple of days would have to be remarkably hotter than anticipated for anything to change the narrative that we’re getting a rate cut in September,” he said to CNBC.
On Tuesday, all three major indexes notched new closing highs. The S&P 500 added 0.27%, while the Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.37%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 196.39 points, or 0.43%, boosted by a jump in shares of UnitedHealth.
