It’s a meeting of three AI heavyweights — Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI — and a deal that bolsters Oracle’s position as a leader in AI innovation. OpenAI has chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to support its growth strategy by providing additional capacity to the Microsoft Azure Al platform.
“We are delighted to be working with Microsoft and Oracle,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “OCI will extend Azure’s platform and enable OpenAI to continue to scale.”
The three-way partnership is another milestone in Oracle’s groundbreaking relationship with Microsoft and a powerful endorsement of OCI in the AI ecosystem. So, why OCI?
Performance and Pricing
More than 100 million users tap OpenAI’s services every month. However, with the snowballing success of ChatGPT — as of this month, it’s experiencing close to 600 million monthly website visits — OpenAI simply can’t scale using Microsoft computing power alone.
That’s where OCI comes in, with its purpose-built capabilities that enable organizations to run complex AI workloads efficiently and cost-effectively in Oracle’s distributed cloud.
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In terms of scalability, the number one feature required for the ongoing expansion of OpenAI, OCI enables organizations to scale up to 32,768 GPUs per cluster with OCI Supercluster. “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.”
Building on a Breakthrough
This latest announcement builds on the partnership Oracle and Microsoft announced in September 2023, an alliance that sent shockwaves through the industry. This month, Oracle said it has reached a multi-cloud partnership with Google Cloud as well.
In their original announcement, Oracle and Microsoft revealed the launch of Oracle Database@Azure, an initiative that ultimately created a multi-cloud service offering with major customer benefits. This news from OpenAI in many ways builds on the foundations of this strategic partnership and exemplifies the changing shape of the partners ecosystem.
Microsoft may be heavily invested in OpenAI — holding a 49% ownership stake — and see the company as an important strategic asset, but in this new environment of competitive co-creation, there are no issues with using the infrastructure of a competing organization to deliver what the customer needs.
That said, OpenAI was keen to “clarify” its relationship with Oracle soon after the announcement:
“Our strategic cloud relationship with Microsoft is unchanged. The partnership with OCI enables OpenAI to use the Azure AI platform on OCI infrastructure for inference and other needs. All pre-training of our frontier models continues to happen on supercomputers built in partnership with Microsoft,” said the company over X.
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