Oracle and Nvidia on Tuesday announced they are expanding their partnership and adding tens of thousands of Nvidia’s chips to boost artificial intelligence-related computational work in Oracle’s cloud.
The expanded partnership has come at a time when more and more companies use AI and the AI models become more complex, needing a ramp-up in data center infrastructure investments.
While the companies refused to say how much the additional hardware would cost or how many chips were sold, they said the expansion includes Nvidia’s A100 and its most advanced H100 GPUs or graphics processing units.
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Those two chips were also on an export control list to China over a month ago. Nvidia said at the time it had included $400 million of potential sales to China, which could be impacted in its third-quarter earnings outlook.
As of August, Nvidia’s market share of so-called accelerator chips inside the world’s six biggest clouds’ infrastructure grew to 85%, according to a note by brokerage Jefferies on Monday. Chips that help accelerate computing speed include GPUs and are heavily used in AI work, where Nvidia has the lion’s share.
While many AI chip startups are challenging Nvidia, Clay Magouyrk, who is in charge of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said he does not see much of an opening for the newcomers.
Manuvir Das, in charge of enterprise computing at Nvidia, said the Oracle partnership includes increased cooperation to make the AI software run more efficiently on Oracle Cloud and provide more support to Oracle’s customers.
