In this special episode of Cloud Wars Live from Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, Bob Evans speaks with Mahesh Thiagarajan, President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), about the extraordinary demand reshaping the cloud and AI landscape. With OCI capacity sold out for 2027 and 2028, Thiagarajan explains how Oracle is accelerating infrastructure deployment, leveraging AI to improve internal operations, and developing innovative power strategies to support growing compute requirements.
Inside Oracle’s Cloud Expansion
The Big Themes
- Oracle’s Cloud Demand Accelerates: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is experiencing extraordinary demand as enterprises accelerate their adoption of AI and cloud technologies. Thiagarajan reveals that OCI’s capacity for 2027 and 2028 is already sold out, illustrating the scale of customer commitments and the challenges associated with bringing new infrastructure online. He attributes Oracle’s competitive success to several foundational advantages: its longstanding stewardship of mission-critical enterprise data, strong price-performance economics, infrastructure flexibility, and deeply embedded security capabilities. These differentiators make OCI attractive to organizations seeking reliable environments for their most important applications and AI initiatives.
- Internal Innovations Become Enterprise Products: Oracle’s approach to product development increasingly draws on technologies created to address its own operational challenges. Thiagarajan describes how internal supply chain optimization work helped inform capabilities incorporated into Oracle Fusion applications. Similarly, developers building new applications exposed the need for better tools to maintain, secure, operate, and publish software at scale. That experience contributed to App Composer. OCI’s work protecting its own cloud infrastructure also helped shape its security mesh capabilities.
- Responsible Development Strengthens Local Communities: Oracle’s AI infrastructure expansion is creating responsibilities that extend beyond technology and into the communities hosting its data centers. Thiagarajan describes responsible development as an essential part of the company’s strategy, emphasizing environmental considerations, community engagement, and local workforce opportunities. Oracle is pursuing closed-loop liquid cooling systems and adapting power technologies to address concerns about emissions. The company is also investing in workforce training to help residents participate in the emerging AI infrastructure economy.
Big Quote: “I think the next phase of AI is going to be around faster access to compute and the companies that can actually deliver the most optimized TCO for realizing those enterprise AI outcomes and their best ideas.”
More from Mahesh Thiagarajan and Oracle:
Follow Mahesh Thiagarajan on LinkedIn or learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications.
