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 cover Microsoft and Oracle’s reactions to the DeepSeek revelations.
Highlights
00:17 — Last week, the CEOs of both Microsoft and Oracle sort of warmly embraced the DeepSeek phenomenon. That’s DeepSeek as a proxy for this new wave of innovation, and in some ways a challenge to the thinking of much of the tech industry, where the way to crack this new massive AI opportunity is with ever bigger, more expensive computing infrastructure.
01:30 — DeepSeek and the DeepSeek phenomenon are challenging in some ways the status quo, DeepSeek seems to be saying, “Hey, wait a minute, everybody, there might be a better way.” Somebody said it’s like they strung together a couple of 20-year-old Nintendo machines and did it. I think that’s an exaggeration, but the idea was right.
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02:14 — Last week it was interesting to see that both the CEOs of Oracle and Microsoft said, “Hey, you know, this is pretty cool. Let’s see what happens.” At an Oracle CloudWorld road event in Austin, Oracle CEO Safra Catz said, “Hey, about this whole DeepSeek thing? I think it’s fantastic.” She said, “Come on in.” She said, “The more competition we have, that’s gonna make us better.”
03:08 — In Microsoft’s fiscal Q2 earnings call, Satya Nadella mentioned during his opening remarks, “DeepSeek now is in GitHub.” He said later, “This is all of a piece of what we’re doing to…boost the output and the efficiency of our infrastructure. The AI scaling involves software optimization across a lot of different areas, and who knows, DeepSeek might be in here.” He said, “They’ve raised some good ideas that we’re thinking about it.”
04:16 — So, again, my view here on DeepSeek is more, let’s think of it as a proxy for all sorts of challenges. A way of saying “Hey, the way these giant companies are doing it is one way. Maybe there’s a different way. Maybe there’s a better way.” And I think, as both Catz and Nadella said, the big winners here, as always the case in the Cloud Wars, are going to be the customers.
