Microsoft is using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for its Microsoft Bing generative AI searches.
Oracle announced the multi-year agreement with Microsoft in a press release. What we don't know is whether Microsoft is using Oracle Cloud to overflow Bing workloads or completely due to efficiency and/or procurement of Nvidia GPUs.
The two companies recently outlined a partnership. Oracle also fired up Nvidia-powered instances and apparently has been able to procure GPUs. Oracle and Microsoft have a history of partnership announcements that seem to be refreshed often. For instance, Oracle and Microsoft outlined an interoperability partnership between clouds in 2019. In 2022, the two companies announced the general availability of Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure.
Also: Oracle adds vector search to Oracle Database 23c, melds generative AI, transactional data | Oracle's Q1 better than expected and Ellison loves generative AI
Although Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Oracle CTO Larry Ellison may seem like odd bedfellows, both companies have joint customers and mutual rivals in AWS and Google Cloud.
The Oracle Cloud-Bing announcement could also simply be a headliner use case for enterprises. Microsoft is using Oracle Cloud along with its Azure AI infrastructure for inferencing for Bing and managed services such as Azure Kubernetes Service to orchestrate workloads. The connection also uses Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure.
Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said that "generative AI has the potential to change the cloud market landscape." Time will tell if the Microsoft-Oracle partnership for Bing conversational workloads is a data point for cloud leadership changes.
Mueller made the following points about reading the tea leaves with the Oracle and Microsoft partnership.
- It is a milestone because no cloud vendor has ever moved internal workloads - or any workloads to a partner/competitor.
- It is a sign that Microsoft may be maxxed out on capacity.
- It is a sign it needs and does charge more to customers than it wants to afford internally.
- Oracle gets the workload of the second largest search engine for generative AI search and evidently have the capacity.
- Oracle seems to get Nvidia chips at a better rate than Microsoft.
Research