News

Lack of Cloud Infrastructure Makes for Strange AI Bedfellows

• By David Ramel
• 06/14/2024

The lack of cloud infrastructure for advanced AI operations can make for strange bedfellows these day. "Cloud hell may have just frozen over as Oracle and Google Cloud outlined a partnership that gives enterprises an option to combine Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud," Oracle said this week.

Generative AI pioneer OpenAI, of ChatGPT fame, this week also partnered with Google archrival cloud giant Microsoft Azure to help boost its AI efforts.

Oracle, Microsoft and OpenAI are partnering to extend the Microsoft Azure AI platform with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to provide additional capacity for OpenAI, the companies announced on Tuesday, the same day Oracle and Google Cloud announced a similar multicloud partnership to "combine [OCI] and Google Cloud technologies to help accelerate their application migrations and modernization."

While not being a Gen AI powerhouse itself, Oracle's OCI is lauded for is speed and cost-effectiveness, so it's being lended out to major AI players to help meet their infrastructure needs.

The Microsoft Azure AI platform will benefit from extended OCI that provides additional capacity for OpenAI, which provides generative AI services to more than 100 million users every month.

"OCI's purpose-built AI capabilities enable startups and enterprises to build and train models faster and more reliably anywhere in Oracle's distributed cloud," Oracle said in a June 11 news release. "For training large language models (LLMs), OCI Supercluster can scale up to 64k NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs or GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchips connected by ultra-low-latency RDMA cluster networking and a choice of HPC storage. OCI Compute virtual machines and OCI's bare metal NVIDIA GPU instances can power applications for generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems, and more."

As far as the OpenAI/Google Cloud announcement, different aspects of the agreement will be rolled out this year, with both companies jointly going-to-market with Oracle Database@Google Cloud, which Oracle said benefits enterprises globally and across multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing and more.

"Cloud hell may have just frozen over as Oracle and Google Cloud outlined a partnership that gives enterprises an option to combine Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud," Oracle said.

Oracle Database@Google Cloud provide Oracle database services running on OCI and deployed in Google Cloud datacenters, designed to help customers accelerate their migration to the cloud so they can modernize their IT environments and take advantage of Google Cloud infrastructure, tooling and AI services, such as data and analytics, Vertex AI and the company's Gemini foundation models. Oracle said customers can benefit from:

• Flexible options to simplify and help accelerate migrating their Oracle databases to Google Cloud, including compatibility with proven migration tools such as Oracle Zero-Downtime Migration.
• A simplified purchasing and contracting experience via Google Cloud Marketplace that enables customers to purchase Oracle database services using their existing Google Cloud commitments and leverage their existing Oracle license benefits including Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and discount programs such as Oracle Support Rewards (OSR).
• Unified customer experience and support from Google Cloud and Oracle.
• The simplicity, security, and latency of a unified operating environment (datacenter) within Google Cloud to deploy the entire portfolio of Oracle database services including Oracle Exadata Database Service, Oracle Autonomous Database Service, MySQL Heatwave, Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service, Oracle GoldenGate, and Oracle Data Safe.
• Connecting their Oracle data with Google's industry-leading AI services including Vertex AI and Gemini foundation models to bring enterprise truth to AI applications and agents for customer service, employee services, creative studios, developer environments, and more.

Quotes from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison were provided.

"We are delighted to be working with Microsoft and Oracle," Altman said. "OCI will extend Azure's platform and enable OpenAI to continue to scale."

"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 Ellison. "Leaders like OpenAI are choosing OCI because it is the world's fastest and most cost-effective AI infrastructure."