Oracle confirms AI strategy for custom chips

Jason Rees, SVP of technology and cloud engineering EMEA at Oracle Cloud during a roundtable this week confirmed that Oracle is not currently looking at developing its own custom chips for artificial intelligence (AI).

When asked if Oracle was exploring the possibility of developing its own custom chips, following in the footsteps of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rees said: "No, not at the moment. It's very much a case of we're working with Nvidia, with AMD, and all the other chip manufacturers. Our partnership is with those companies."

Rees added on Oracle's relationship with Nvidia: "We have a relationship with Nvidia, and what that means is the way we have architected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) means that the network fabric of our cloud really allows us to get the massive scale required. Looking at training models, for instance, you've got the ability to cluster different regions together.

"We've got a concept for superclusters that can scale up to 32,000 GPUs - Nvidia H100s, H200s, Nvidia Grasshopper. These are all clustered together on our infrastructure."