Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
The AI Ecosystem Q2 2024 Report compiles the innovations, funding, and products highlighted in AI Ecosystem Reports from the second quarter of 2024. Download now for perspectives on the companies, innovations, and solutions shaping the future of AI.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss Larry Ellison’s groundbreaking plan to build the world’s largest data center, powered by three modular nuclear reactors.
Highlights
00:02 — We’re here at Oracle CloudWorld, and lots of fun stuff is going on. The latest is that Larry Ellison’s plan involves this giant new data center that he says will be the biggest in the world. Not just the biggest; it’s going to be powered by three nuclear power reactors.
00:32 — On Oracle’s fiscal Q1 earnings call, somebody asked Ellison, “How are you going to be able to keep up with these bigger and bigger companies? The cost is getting so high.” Ellison went on to say this: Oracle is designing a gigawatt-plus data center, and it’s got the building permits for three small nuclear reactors — modular nuclear reactors, he called them — to power the data center.
01: 32 — Data centers are getting bigger and bigger because of the AI revolution’s needs. But it isn’t just the size; it’s these different sorts of innovations coming in. How do you ensure you can get reliable power to a facility of that size? How can you ensure that it’s cost-effective?
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
02:18 — This came during the buzz around Oracle’s big talk too, about the multi-cloud deal with AWS. Now, all three of the other hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS — have multi-cloud agreements with Oracle. I’m sure there were lots of different factors involved here, lots of different companies saying, “Let’s get after this.” I believe it was Larry Ellison that drove this.
03:05— Larry Ellison just charges ahead with ideas that, at the outset, seem outlandish but, in the long run, prove to be almost always incredibly successful. We’ve seen this with things like the Autonomous Database and Alloy. This is why I think Oracle’s market cap, the day after Q1 earnings came out, went up about $50 billion.
04:07 — It’s this type of thinking that has allowed Oracle — although it’s much, much smaller in the cloud than Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — to have an outsized impact, taking huge chunks of market share away from three of the world’s biggest, wealthiest, and most influential corporations.
