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During the company’s most recent earnings call, Oracle founder Larry Ellison admitted (via Barron’s) said he had to beg Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to supply his company with its latest GPUs. “At Nobu Palo Alto, I went to dinner with Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs. Please take our money; no, take more. You’re not taking enough; we need you to take more of our money, please,” Ellison said on the call. “It went well; it worked.”
It seems like the dinner was very productive and the money was well spent for Ellison and Oracle. The company recently announced that it would be creating a Zettascale AI supercluster composed of 131,072 Nvidia GB200 Blackwell NVL72 GPUs deliver 2.4 ZettaFLOPS of AI performance, more power than Musk and xAI’s Memphis Supercluster, which currently has 100,000 Nvidia H100 AI GPUs.
Oracle’s AI projects require an incredible amount of power, which is also why the company has already building permit for three modular nuclear reactors to meet the electrical needs of its facilities. However, since the deployment of nuclear reactors in data centers will likely take several years, the company could, in the meantime, follow Musk’s lead and use massive mobile generators to strengthen local electricity supply if necessary.
While it’s smaller than other big tech companies that offer data center services, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has a distinct advantage over these giants. According to Barron’s report, OCI offers greater flexibility and can meet the specific requirements of certain customers. It can even provide offline servers that run on its own network infrastructure to maximize security for the most demanding customers.
Despite its size, Oracle continues to invest in AI. Ellison estimates that training the cutting-edge AI models that will be created in the next three years will cost $100 billion. echoing the thoughts of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on the subject. And it seems that OCI wants to be one of the leaders in AI processing. “Somebody is going to be better than anybody else at this, and a lot of people are trying, and there’s a race,” Ellison said on the call. He later added: “Getting there first is a big deal.”