Oracle has scored a major win, partnering with OpenAI to help the latter expand Azure AI platform and increase OpenAI’s operational capacity.
OpenAI has a close working relationship with Microsoft, who is also its biggest investor. The company’s tech powers Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI search capabilities. OpenAI’s models also feature prominently in Microsoft’s Azure AI platform.
The choice to tap Oracle for additional capacity is an interesting one, and a testament to the performance and power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
OCI’s leading AI infrastructure is advancing AI innovation. OpenAI will join thousands of AI innovators across industries worldwide that run their AI workloads on OCI AI infrastructure. Adept, Modal, MosaicML, NVIDIA, Reka, Suno, Together AI, Twelve Labs, xAI, and others use OCI Supercluster to train and inference next-generation AI models.
“We are delighted to be working with Microsoft and Oracle. OCI will extend Azure’s platform and enable OpenAI to continue to scale,” said Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer, OpenAI.
“The race to build the world’s greatest large language model is on, and it is fueling unlimited demand for Oracle’s Gen2 AI infrastructure,” said Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO. “Leaders like OpenAI are choosing OCI because it is the world’s fastest and most cost-effective AI infrastructure.”
Oracle has become an increasingly important cloud infrastructure provider. In fact, at a recent quarterly earnings report, executives said the company was struggling to keep up with the demand.
“Large new cloud infrastructure contracts signed in Q3 drove Oracle’s total Remaining Performance Obligations up 29% to over $80 billion—an all-time record,“ Oracle CEO Safra Catz said at the time. “We expect to continue receiving large contracts reserving cloud infrastructure capacity because the demand for our Gen2 AI infrastructure substantially exceeds supply—despite the fact we are opening new and expanding existing cloud datacenters very, very rapidly.
Larry Ellison has long touted Oracle Cloud’s reliability, saying it represents a major advantage over its larger rivals.
“Let me close with a note that I’m going to paraphrase from a very large telecommunications company who uses our cloud and all the other three North American clouds — Google, Amazon and Microsoft,” Ellison once said. “And the note basically said the one thing we’ve noticed about Oracle, Oracle’s cloud, is that it never ever goes down. We can’t say that about any of the other clouds. We think this is a critical differentiator.”