The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition that a plan unveiled with U.S. President Donald Trump has intensified hopes that Oracle's cloud business will see a tailwind from artificial intelligence. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says the stock's latest advance came on news the software company is forming a $100-billion (U.S.) joint venture with Softbank Group and OpenAI to finance an expansion of data centres to support a business in which Oracle lags behind rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft. "This certainly has us looking at the name in a way we hadn't before, since this could represent a meaningful inflection in growth," said Tim Ghriskey at Ingalls & Snyder LLC. "It seems like it is in good company here, but my main hesitation is about how long this halo might last, since the stock has really rocketed." Oracle shares have performed like some of the tech giants that have driven the market's gains for the past two years, as it seeks to establish itself as a major player in cloud computing. The stock is up more than 10 per cent in January after posting a nearly 60-per-cent gain last year, its best performance since 1999. The joint venture has a goal of growing to "at least" $500-billion (U.S.).