• Oracle and Microsoft have signed a multi-year agreement to provide OCI AI infrastructure for Bing.
• The infrastructure will allow Bing to deliver search results far quicker than it currently does.
• Microsoft also announced that it was making Azure AI infrastructure available to startups.

Microsoft has been plugging artificial intelligence into as many products as possible, including its search engine, Bing. As it turns out, giving folks access to a rather good AI tool has brought in more users than Microsoft can seemingly handle.

As such, the firm needs to find more computing power and to that end, it’s turning to Oracle. On Tuesday, Oracle announced a multi-year agreement with Microsoft to provide Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI infrastructure.

“Leveraging the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft is able to use managed services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to orchestrate OCI Compute at massive scale to support increasing demand for Bing conversational search,” Oracle wrote in a press release.

We note the mention of supporting demand for “Bing conversational search”, rather than a business application. This is notable as folks can use Bing and the Bing Chat function for free. While Oracle didn’t disclose how much the deal is worth, the amount of compute power Microsoft will have access to is immense.

“Microsoft Bing is leveraging the latest advancements in AI to provide a dramatically better search experience for people across the world,” says Divya Kumar, global head of marketing for Search and AI at Microsoft. “Our collaboration with Oracle and use of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure along with our Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure, will expand access to customers and improve the speed of many of our search results.”

Oracle says that its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Superclusters can call on 32 768 A100 GPUs or 1 384 H100 GPUs, and petabytes of high-performance clustered file system storage to scale up to 4 096 OCI Compute Bare Metal instances. While we doubt Oracle will reserve all of this power for Bing, that depends on how much Microsoft is paying here.

This move could, however, prove rather profitable for Oracle in the future.

At the same time this partnership was being penned, Microsoft announced that it was updating its startup program to include a free Azure AI infrastructure option for high-end GPU virtual machine clusters, for use in training and running large language models and other deep learning models.

Startups forming part of Y Combinator will be the first to access this offering in a private preview. This could help Oracle in the long term, should these startups develop a thirst for AI and require the OCI platform to run their AI solutions.

That is a big if but by partnering with one of the bigger players in the AI space, Oracle is bound to learn a few things that it can use to improve its overall product.

For now, Bing will answer your questions with a bit more speed. Let’s see how the other AI platforms respond.