Microsoft Partners with Oracle to Support 'Explosive Growth' of its AI Services
Microsoft is partnering with Oracle in a multi-year agreement that will leverage the compute resources of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to support the "explosive growth" of demand for Microsoft's AI services, the two companies say. The deal allows Redmond to use Oracle's GPU superclusters, in conjunction with its own Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), to power conversational searches in Bing.
"Microsoft Bing is leveraging the latest advancements in AI to provide a dramatically better search experience for people across the world," said Divya Kumar, global head of marketing for Search & AI at Microsoft, in a release announcing the partnership on Tuesday. "Our collaboration with Oracle and use of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure along with our Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure, will expand access to customers and improve the speed of many of our search results."
First announced in September 2023, OCI Superclusters aim to provide a blend of OCI Compute Bare Metal instances, low-latency RDMA cluster networking and a suite of high-performance computing (HPC) storage options. Designed for scalability, these superclusters include the capacity to expand up to 4,096 OCI Compute Bare Metal instances and are equipped with an array of GPUs, offering either 32,768 NVIDIA A100 GPUs or 16,384 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
The partnership will help to provide Microsoft's ChatGTP-powered generative AI capabilities with the cloud infrastructure needed, as Microsoft looks to expand its reach in the gen AI search space. Microsoft began rolling out its Bing Chat Enterprise in preview during the summer.
While the two companies have had a somewhat rocky relationship in the past, this week's partnership furthers the two companies' cooperation in the cloud space. Last year Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, a joint venture between the two, was released for multi-cloud environments. These recent moves show that the companies' past history has not hindered collaboration.
"Generative AI is a monumental technological leap and Oracle is enabling Microsoft and thousands of other businesses to build and run new products with our OCI AI capabilities," said Karan Batta, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "By furthering our collaboration with Microsoft, we are able to help bring new experiences to more people around the world."