Monday, July 3rd 2023
Oracle to Spend Billions on NVIDIA Data Center GPUs, Even More on Ampere & AMD CPUs
Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison last week announced a substantial spending spree on new equipment as he prepares his business for a cloud computing service expansion that will be aimed at attracting a "new wave" of artificial intelligence (AI) companies. He made this announcement at a recent Ampere event: "This year, Oracle will buy GPUs and CPUs from three companies...We will buy GPUs from NVIDIA, and we're buying billions of dollars of those. We will spend three times that on CPUs from Ampere and AMD. We still spend more money on conventional compute." His cloud division is said to be gearing up to take on larger competition—namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. Oracle is hoping to outmaneuver these major players by focusing on the construction of fast networks, capable of shifting around huge volumes of data—the end goal being the creation of its own ChatGPT-type model.
Ellison's expressed that he was leaving Team Blue behind—Oracle has invested heavily in Ampere Computing—a startup founded by ex-Intel folks: "It's a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We've moved to a new architecture...We think that this is the future. The old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit." Oracle's database software has been updated to run on Ampere's Arm-based chips, Ellison posits that these grant greater power efficiency when compared to AMD and NVIDIA enterprise processors. There will be some reliance on "x86-64" going forward, since Oracle's next-gen Exadata X10M platform was recently announced with the integration of Team Red's EPYC 9004 series processors—a company spokesman stated that these server CPUs offer higher core counts and "extreme scale and dramatically improved price performance," when compared to older Intel Xeon systems.
Ellison's expressed that he was leaving Team Blue behind—Oracle has invested heavily in Ampere Computing—a startup founded by ex-Intel folks: "It's a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We've moved to a new architecture...We think that this is the future. The old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit." Oracle's database software has been updated to run on Ampere's Arm-based chips, Ellison posits that these grant greater power efficiency when compared to AMD and NVIDIA enterprise processors. There will be some reliance on "x86-64" going forward, since Oracle's next-gen Exadata X10M platform was recently announced with the integration of Team Red's EPYC 9004 series processors—a company spokesman stated that these server CPUs offer higher core counts and "extreme scale and dramatically improved price performance," when compared to older Intel Xeon systems.