OCI demand for AI workloads, Cerner boost Oracle’s third quarter revenue

Oracle on Thursday reported third quarter total revenue of $12.4 billion, up 18% year-on-year, boosted by the demand for AI workloads in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Cerner’s contribution to the topline.

“So, we have a lot of business, a lot of new AI companies coming to Oracle because we’re the only ones who can run their workloads. And by the way — and we are cheaper. But so we’re faster and we’re cheaper,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said during an earnings call with analysts.

Top Oracle executives claim that the second generation of OCI has a superior architecture and network capability that enables it to run AI workloads faster.

Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud, according to Ellison, is different from other products on offer from rival hyperscalers as it uses a non-blocking Remote Direct Access Memory (RDMA) network that allows two networked computers to share information without using any processing power.

“What this means is if you’re running a large group of Nvidia GPUs in a cluster doing a large AI problem at Oracle, we can build these AI clusters dynamically. Our standard network supports the large clustering of GPUs and allows them to communicate very quickly. So, we can create these groups of GPUs. We can marshal them together. The other guys can’t do that,” Ellison said during the earnings call, according to a transcript from The Motley Fool.

In contrast, other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms on offer from other hyperscalers, according to Ellison, are physically building new hardware to be able to support such a similar AI cluster.