Oracle joins up with Nvidia to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities

Texas-based company will add thousands of Nvidia's GPUs including the A100 and coming H100 to its arsenal

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and chief executive. Reuters

US software company Oracle announced a multiyear partnership with Nvidia — a global leader in artificial intelligence hardware and software that designs and manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs) for various industries — to boost its cloud infrastructure.

Under the partnership — announced in parallel with the opening of the Oracle Cloud World event in Las Vegas, Nevada — Oracle will use tens of thousands of Nvidia's GPUs to accelerate the pace of computing and AI advancements in its cloud infrastructure.

Following the announcement, Oracle’s stock was trading slightly up at $67.03 at 5.40pm New York time, while Nvidia was trading up at $119.67 a share.

The Texas-based company intends to bring the full Nvidia computing stack — including GPUs, systems and software — to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

GPUs can process various tasks simultaneously, making them useful for machine learning, video editing and gaming applications.

OCI is adding “tens of thousands more Nvidia GPUs including the A100 and upcoming H100 to its capacity”, Oracle said in a statement.

About a month ago, the US restricted Nvidia from exporting its A100 and H100 chips, designed to speed up machine-learning tasks, to China and Russia.

Combined with OCI’s AI cloud infrastructure, cluster networking and storage, this partnership provides enterprises a broad, easily accessible portfolio of options for AI training and deep learning inference at scale, Oracle said.

“To drive long-term success in today’s business environment, organisations need answers and insight faster than ever,” the company's chief executive Safra Catz said.

“Our expanded alliance with Nvidia will deliver the best of both companies’ expertise to help customers across industries — from health care and manufacturing to telecommunications and financial services — overcome the multitude of challenges they face.”

The Oracle and Nvidia partnership comes as more companies integrate AI and machine-learning tools to streamline their operations and as AI models become more complex.

The companies did not disclose the financial details of the deal.

“Accelerated computing and AI are key to tackling rising costs in every aspect of operating businesses,” California-based Nvidia’s founder and chief executive Jensen Huang said.

“Enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud-first AI strategies that enable fast development and scalable deployment. Our partnership with Oracle will put Nvidia AI within easy reach for thousands of companies.”

The global AI market is expected to grow at an annual rate of more than 38 per cent from 2022 to 2030, from $93.5 billion last year, Grand View Research reported.

AI will be the common theme in the top 10 technology trends in the next few years, and these are expected to quicken breakthroughs across key economic sectors and society, Alibaba Damo Academy — the global research arm of Chinese company Alibaba Group — said in a report.