In a bold move signifying the growing importance of artificial intelligence, Oracle has announced a staggering investment of over $100 billion in the development of 2,000+ new data centers. This massive expansion, building upon the company’s existing network of 160 data centers, will see NVIDIA securing a significant portion of the business, supplying the AI hardware necessary to power this ambitious initiative.
The scope of this project is truly remarkable, with plans to utilize the power of three nuclear reactors to fuel the Blackwell AI GPU supercluster. This cutting-edge infrastructure will be used to launch zettascale OCI superclusters boasting over 100,000 AI GPUs, accelerating the training and deployment of generative AI models. NVIDIA’s GB200 liquid-cooled bare-metal instances, designed for large-scale AI applications, will be incorporated, alongside Oracle’s offering of NVIDIA HGX H200 Tensor Core GPUs, capable of connecting up to 65,536 AI GPUs for real-time inference.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison highlighted the significant financial commitment required to compete in this rapidly evolving field. He stated, “These AI models, these frontier models are going to… the entry price for a real frontier model from someone who wants to compete in that area is about $100 billion. Let me repeat, around $100 billion. That’s over the next 4, 5 years for anyone who wants to play in that game. That’s a lot of money. And it doesn’t get easier. So there are not going to be a lot of those.”
Ellison further emphasized the growing importance of specialized AI models, particularly in fields like healthcare. He shared examples of AI applications being used to analyze biopsies, CAT scans, and blood tests to detect cancer. These specialized models, often trained on massive datasets like millions of biopsy slides, require significant computing power and highlight the ongoing battle for technical supremacy in AI. Ellison stated, “I think this is an ongoing battle for technical supremacy that will be fought by a handful of companies and maybe one nation state over the next 5 years at least, but probably more like 10. So this business is just growing larger and larger and larger. There’s no slowdown or shift coming.”
