Larry Ellison is finally smiling. It took Google Cloud and OpenAI nearly nine months to realise the importance of Oracle Cloud Services(OCI). AWS, hopefully, will follow suit.
The outcome: Oracle chief Ellison saw almost $19 billion in wealth as the company he founded in 1977 forecasted double-digit revenue growth for the fiscal year.
Moreover, following these announcements, the software company’s shares skyrocketed by 13% in extended trading on Wednesday.
Oracle Cloud Services reported a revenue of $10.2 billion in Q4 2024. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud posted $26.7 billion in sales for the recent quarter, AWS reached $25 billion, and Google Cloud reported $9.6 billion.
OpenAI will now run its workloads on OCI, extending the Microsoft Azure AI platform to Oracle’s cloud services.
“Like many others, OpenAI chose OCI because it is the world’s fastest and most cost-effective AI infrastructure,” said Oracle chief Safra Catz in a recent earnings call. She added that Oracle has signed over 30 AI contracts totalling over $12 billion this quarter and nearly $17 billion this year.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s xAI is discussing with Oracle executives the possibility of spending $10 billion over the next few years renting cloud servers.
OpenAI, in its recent post on X, clarified: “The partnership with OCI enables OpenAI to use the Azure AI platform on OCI infrastructure for inference and other needs.” However, all pre-training of frontier models will continue to happen on supercomputers built in partnership with Microsoft.
In the backdrop of the Data + AI Summit, Databricks lauded Oracle.
“We’ve seen Oracle become much more relevant in the cloud space in this AI era. We actually have partnerships with them around GPUs already, so many of the models we’ve trained on Mosaic AI, custom models that we trained, have been trained on infrastructure provided by Oracle,” said the Databricks chief Ali Ghodsi, hinting at a plausible partnership in the coming months, pointing at customer requirements.
“Congrats to Ellison. He needs it,” said Ghodsi.
The King of Multi-Cloud
Oracle announced Oracle Database@Azure last year, which delivers Oracle database services running on OCI inside Azure data centres and gives customers more flexibility in where they run their workloads.
Ellison said that customers have already been using multi-cloud products and services, and there are even stronger reasons to believe they should be interoperable and interconnected more than ever.
“We’re doing the same thing with Google. We would love to do the same thing with AWS. We think we should be interconnected to everybody, and that’s what we’re attempting to do in our multi-cloud strategy,” said Ellison.
Expanding on its multi-cloud strategy, Oracle recently partnered with Google Cloud, giving customers the choice to combine OCI and Google Cloud to help accelerate their application migrations and modernisation.
“OCI and Google Cloud network interconnect is available immediately in 10 regions, and we will be live with Oracle Database at Google Cloud in September, where customers can get direct access to Oracle Database services running on OCI deployed in Google Cloud data centres,” said Ellison.
Pradeep Vincent, chief technical architect of Oracle, in an exclusive interview, told AIM that OCI is pretty different from the competitors out there. “Our goal is to make it easy for customers to use multiple clouds, period,” he said, explaining that a key part of this is their ‘distributed cloud strategy’, putting the cloud where customers want it.
On similar lines, Ellison also said, “We believe in giving customers a choice, and they want it. Customers are using multiple clouds, including infrastructure clouds and applications like Salesforce and Workday. Therefore, we think it’s very important for all these clouds to become interconnected”.
In the coming months, Ellison mentioned that Oracle looks to get rid of these fees (or egress cost) for moving data from cloud to cloud, and all the clouds will be interconnected and customers can pick their favorite service from their favorite cloud and mix and match whatever they want to use and do it easily and seamlessly.
Further, he said that OCI’s RDMA network moves data much faster. “And when you charge by the minute, faster also means less expensive,” he said, adding that OCI trains large language models several times faster and at a fraction of the cost of other clouds.