Oracle on Tuesday announced plans to deploy tens of thousands of Nvidia's top-of-the-range A100 and H100 compute GPUs to its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The A100 and H100 GPUs will be available for Oracle's cloud customers for their AI workloads enabled by Nvidia's AI software. The deal's exact terms remain behind closed doors, but we are talking about a transaction worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The new collaboration between Nvidia and Oracle will make AI training, computer vision, data processing, deep learning inference, and simulation available to all enterprise customers. They will not have to invest hefty sums into deploying their data centers with Nvidia's expensive compute GPUs. Oracle already offers OCI clients access to high-performance computing instances and will now provide them with various AI capabilities.
Enterprise clients of Oracle's OCI will be able to access all of Nvidia's AI platforms, including the following:
- AI Enterprise — a set of engines that can be used for AI model training, compute vision, conversational AI, data processing, recommender systems, and simulation, among others.
- RAPIDS — acceleration for Apache Spark data processing on the OCI Data Flow fully-managed Apache Spark service, including bare metal instances like BM.GPU.GM4.8 with A100 Tensor Core GPUs.
- Clara — medical imaging, genomics, natural language processing, and drug discovery (coming soon).
Nvidia's A100 and H100 compute GPUs are pretty expensive. Even previous-generation A100 compute GPUs cost $10,000 to $15,000 depending on the exact configuration, and the next-generation H100 products promise to be even more costly. So while Oracle is unlikely to buy Nvidia's compute GPUs for retail prices, it still pays a premium for Nvidia's hardware and software.
Keeping in mind that we are talking about tens of thousands of computing GPUs along with Nvidia's NVLink switches and possibly data processing units, we would expect the deal between Nvidia and Oracle to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which is quite an unprecedented contract. In any case, working with Oracle is vital for Nvidia as shortly it will not be able to sell compute CPUs to customers in China.
"Our expanded alliance with Nvidia will deliver the best of both companies' expertise to help customers across industries — from healthcare and manufacturing to telecommunications and financial services — overcome the multitude of challenges they face," said Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle.
