Oracle, Microsoft sign multi-year deal to advance AI services

Oracle announced on Tuesday that it has entered into a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to support the growth of its artificial intelligence (AI) services. 

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will use its own Azure infrastructure for AI in combination with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Supercluster — a supercomputing training and inferencing service supported by Nvidia GPUs that was released in March. 

Superclusters provide networking, HPC storage, and OCI Compute bare metal instances, and have the capacity to support tens of thousands of Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs in a single cluster. 

The OCI Supercluster service is the first tier of Oracle's generative AI strategy, aimed at companies like Cohere or Hugging Face, which are working on developing large language models (LLMs) to support their end users. 

According to a joint statement from the companies, the combination of the OCI Supercluster and Azure AI will enable Microsoft to conduct inferencing of AI models that are continuously being optimized to power Bing conversational searches every day. 

Karan Batta, SVP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, stated, "Generative AI is a significant technological advancement, and Oracle is enabling Microsoft and numerous other businesses to build and operate new products using our OCI AI capabilities. By expanding our collaboration with Microsoft, we can bring new experiences to more people around the world." 

Microsoft is using Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to orchestrate OCI Compute. 

Divya Kumar, global head of marketing for Search & AI at Microsoft, said, "Microsoft Bing is utilizing the latest AI advancements to deliver a vastly improved search experience for people worldwide. Our collaboration with Oracle and our utilization of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, along with our Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure, will expand customer access and enhance the speed of many of our search results." 

In September, Oracle extended its partnership with Microsoft by colocating its database hardware (including Oracle Exadata) and software in Microsoft Azure data centers, giving customers direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) via Azure.