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.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore the growing partnership between Larry Ellison of Oracle and Sam Altman of OpenAI, their ambitious Stargate project, and how it’s reshaping the AI and cloud landscape.
Highlights
00:14 —Two forces of nature in the tech business, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Sam Altman of OpenAI, have come together in a very interesting relationship that seems to be getting closer and more expansive every week. And what they’re doing here is they’re turning the Stargate announcement, which came back in January at the White House, into reality.
01:22 — Abilene, Texas, a town of about 125,000 people, 180 miles west of Dallas, a fairly typical American city of the Southwest, is never going to be the same again, because that’s the location for the first Stargate AI Training Center. They’re planning something of almost a similar scale in Abu Dhabi.
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02:35 — There have been a lot of reports over the last week or two about how Oracle is buying $40 billion dollars worth of NVIDIA’s most powerful GPUs to power this Stargate facility here. Those haven’t been confirmed, but the close relationship between Larry Ellison and Jensen Huang and the relationship that Oracle and NVIDIA have had for a while makes that likely.
03:28 — With this emerging relationship between Oracle and OpenAI, Microsoft has lost some luster as the unacknowledged leader in the cloud and AI. OpenAI, which grew up with a very close, exclusive relationship with Microsoft has now decided over the last several months, “I want to be able to go out with other people. I want to do other things.”
04:17 — I’m in San Francisco, and today is the opening day of the Snowflake Summit, and Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy will be speaking during his keynote with Sam Altman. So here’s OpenAI and Snowflake. There’s just a world of new opportunities opening up for OpenAI.
