Microsoft has partnered with Oracle to prop up its Azure AI platform by running workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
The news, (via The Register), follows Oracle’s chair and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Larry Ellison’s piece during the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call, in which he stated with confidence that the company was building a “a very, very, you know, large data center, very big”, and that as much as half of it was reserved for Microsoft alone.
Like most other tech companies, Oracle and Microsoft are laser-focussed on fusing cloud computing and artificial intelligence workloads. This seems to be working for Oracle at the very least, earning $14.3 billion in Q4 alone, with cloud service licencing revenues rising nine percent to provide $10.2 billion of that figure.
Infinite growth foretold
Oracle CEO Safra Catz was keen to posture about the ‘cloud pivot’ driving these revenues, and emphasize the importance of the company’s “revenue, earnings, cash flow performance [and] growth rates […] [getting] stronger and [accelerating]”.
Despite Oracle reporting in 2024 that its cloud infrastructure revenue has grown by 50% year-on-year, Catz said that she wants and expects the needle to move faster next year.
Ellison, who already has a very, you know, strong grasp of this topic, discussed the need to grow the operation, dreaming out loud of “larger and larger data centers”. “Some are getting very close to, dare I say it, a gigawatt, which is a pretty good-sized city or one enormous AI cloud training data center.”
Elsewhere in the crystal ball, Oracle is keen to announce another partnership with Google that will, later this year, allow that company’s cloud customers to leverage OCI to ‘help accelerate their application migrations’ and deploy AI-assisted workloads with no data-transfer charges.
The fruits of that labor, Google Cloud’s ‘Cross-Cloud-Interconnect’, is set to launch later this year.