Oracle challenges cloud giants with new Nvidia AI hardware offering

Oracle today announced an expansion of its partnership with Nvidiaintroducing new GPU options and AI infrastructure services Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This move signals a maturing artificial intelligence market and aims to provide greater flexibility for companies of all sizes looking to leverage AI capabilities.

The announcement focuses on the addition of Nvidia L40S GPUs to OCI’s computing offerings and new virtual machine options for Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

“This is a great milestone in our partnership with Nvidia and in the AI ​​market,” said Leo Leung, VP of OCI and Oracle Tech, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We fulfill this kind of maturation and expansion of customer use cases at a high level.”

L40S GPU: A multi-function AI accelerator

The new L40S GPU instances are positioned as versatile options for a range of AI workloads, including inference, smaller model training, and graphics-intensive applications such as digital twins.

Dave Salvator, director of Accelerated Computing Products at Nvidia, emphasized the versatility of the L40S GPU. “We think of it as a universal AI accelerator,” he told VentureBeat. “It can do your traditional AI, probably more focused on the inference side, but can also be used to train small models. It also has visual capabilities for 3D rendering and video processing.”

Oracle offers these new GPU options in both bare metal and virtual machine configurations, giving customers more choice in how they deploy AI workloads. Leung emphasized the importance of the bare metal offering, saying: “With bare metal there is no argument. You get all the resources available to the customer. And that is crucial for the first phase of AI, where people want maximum performance.”

OCI Supercluster: Support massive AI models

The announcement also includes updates to Oracle’s “OCI supercluster” service, which now supports up to 65,000 NVIDIA GPUs. This massive scale is intended for organizations training the largest AI models with hundreds of billions of parameters.

“Scale really matters,” Salvator said. “That is a combination of computing power and really capable networks. The faster you can deploy, the faster you can derive and market your application and get value from it.”

Industry analysts see this expansion as a strategic move by Oracle to compete more aggressively in the AI ​​cloud market dominated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft AzureAnd Google Cloud. By leveraging its partnership with Nvidia, Oracle is positioning itself as a serious candidate for companies looking to deploy large-scale AI workloads.

The partnership also benefits Nvidia, providing a new major cloud platform to showcase the latest GPU technologies and expand its reach in the enterprise market.

Expanding AI access across enterprise sizes

As AI continues to transform industries, the race among cloud providers to offer the most powerful and flexible AI infrastructure is heating up. Oracle’s latest offering demonstrates its commitment to staying competitive in this rapidly evolving landscape.

For companies, these new options provide opportunities to right-scale their AI infrastructure investments, potentially lowering barriers to entry for smaller organizations while providing the necessary scale for the most demanding AI workloads.

As Leung summarized, “As a cloud provider, from our perspective, we want to serve all those types of customers,” from tech giants hosting gigantic models to small engineering teams working on specialized applications.

With this announcement, Oracle has made a clear statement about its AI ambitions, paving the way for greater competition in the cloud AI market.