Uber has teamed up with Ampere Computing to develop custom chips.

Uber is set to use custom Ampere Computing chips on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Announced at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, Uber is partnering with Ampere and Oracle to have more control over how its workloads are running on OCI. The partnership enables Uber to co-design its chips with the US fabless semiconductor firm.

“At Uber, we very much like to go deep into the tech,” said Kamran Zargahi, Uber's senior director of technology strategy. “We just didn’t use the cloud as a tool and just stay there comfortably. We really wanted to be able to understand the regional and the zonal shapes, the price performance, and all the specifics of the bits and bytes.”

According to Zargahi, Uber drivers and couriers complete more than 30 million trips daily, and the computing infrastructure is used for things like route optimization. “Every second, 15 million AI models get executed, Uber is a prime example of a forward-thinking organization that embraces multi-cloud partnerships to deliver valuable services to its customers,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “We look forward to evolving our cloud partnership with Uber as they continue their rapid growth.”, Zargahi said.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Renée James and a group of her former Intel colleagues, Ampere designs chips specifically for servers based on Arm architecture, which has grown in popularity among data center operators in recent years. Ampere has been providing chips to Oracle since 2021 and claims that 95 percent of Oracle's services are using its infrastructure at present. Earlier this month reports emerged that Ampere was exploring a sale.