During the company's latest earnings call, Oracle founder Larry Ellison admitted (via Barron’s) that he had to beg Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to supply his company with its latest GPUs. “In 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 of it. You’re not taking enough of it; we need you to take more of our money, please,” Ellison said during the call. “It went okay; it worked.”
$ORCL CTO Larry Ellison: "I went to dinner with @elonmusk, Jensen Huang..& I would describe the dinner as Oracle & me & Elon begging Jensen for GPUs. Please take our money....No, no, take more of it. You're not taking out enough. We need you to take more of our money, please" pic.twitter.com/atBUJaULCSSeptember 14, 2024
It looks like this dinner was very productive indeed and that it was money well spent for Ellison and Oracle. The company recently announced that it will create a Zettascale AI supercluster composed of 131,072 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 Blackwell GPUs that delivers 2.4 ZettaFLOPS of AI performance—more powerful than Musk and xAI’s Memphis Supercluster, which currently has 100,000 Nvidia H100 AI GPUs.
Oracle’s AI plans demand an incredible amount of power, which is also why the company has already secured permits to build three modular nuclear reactors to deliver the electrical needs of its facilities. However, since deploying nuclear reactors to data centers will likely take several years, the company could, in the meantime, follow Musk’s lead and use massive mobile generators to boost local power supply if needed.
Despite being 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 provides better flexibility and can meet specific requirements that some customers demand. It can even provide offline servers that run on its own networking infrastructure to maximize security for the most demanding clients.
But despite its size, Oracle is pushing its investments in AI. Ellison says that frontier AI models coming in the next three years will cost $100 billion to train, echoing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s thoughts on the matter. And it seems that OCI wants to become one of the leaders in AI processing. “Someone’s going to be better at this than anybody else, and multiple people are trying, and there is a race,” said Ellison during the call. He then added later, “Getting there first is a big deal.”
