Oracle and Nvidia expand AI partnership

Oracle and Nvidia have extended their partnership to help speed customer adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) services.

As part of the deal, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which is Oracle’s cloud service, will beef up the infrastructure with tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, both the Ampere A100 currently on the market and the upcoming Hopper H100. Oracle will also add Nvidia’s AI software stack that supports AI training and deep learning.

This includes an upcoming release of Nvidia AI Enterprise software with access to Nvidia’s AI development and deployment platform that provides processing engines for each step of the AI workflow, from data processing and AI model training to simulation and large-scale deployment.

“Our expanded alliance will deliver the best of both companies’ expertise to help customers across industries—from healthcare and manufacturing to telecommunications and financial services—overcome the multitude of challenges they face,” said Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, in a statement.

Additionally, Oracle now offers early access to Nvidia’s RAPIDS acceleration for Apache Spark data processing on the OCI Apache Spark service. Nvidia’s Clara, a healthcare AI and HPC application framework, is also coming soon.

Oracle has been slow to develop its cloud offerings as it walked the line between growing them without cannibalizing its on-premises business.

Synergy Research Group says Oracle’s public cloud market share sits at just two percent but its cloud-revenue growth is pretty much keeping pace with overall market growth. To make serious headway, it needs to outpace the market growth .

“There is no doubt that Oracle intends to stay in the game, and the fact is that it has almost doubled its capex [for building out OCI] in the last four quarters, relative to the preceding four quarters,” said John Dinsdale, chief researcher with Synergy, which puts that spending at a level he says he has not seen before. “However, to put this in context, both Microsoft and Google continue to invest more than six times as much as Oracle in capex, and Amazon is way ahead of Microsoft and Google.”