In September, Microsoft and Oracle made a joint announcement, revealing the two big tech companies were teaming up to create a new cloud-based service, Oracle Database Azure. Today, the two companies revealed yet another partnership that will help Microsoft power its Bing search service with help from Oracle.
In a press release, Oracle stated it has entered a new multi-year agreement with Microsoft that will allow the company to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in combination with Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure, to power and optimize Microsoft"s Bing conversational searches.
The press release goes into detail on the hardware that Oracle is providing to power Bing searches:
OCI Superclusters include OCI Compute Bare Metal instances, ultra-low latency RDMA cluster networking, and a choice of HPC storage. OCI Superclusters can scale up to 4,096 OCI Compute Bare Metal instances with 32,768 A100 GPUs or 16,384 H100 GPUs, and petabytes of high-performance clustered file system storage to efficiently process massively parallel applications.
Oracle says Microsoft is able to use its Azure Kubernetes Service on its Cloud Infrastructure services "at massive scale to support increasing demand for Bing conversational search." That last bit may indicate Microsoft is indeed seeing more demand for Bing and Bing Chat and needed some help from Oracle"s hardware and infrastructure to keep up with overall demand.
The press release quotes Divya Kumar, the global head of marketing for Search and AI at Microsoft, as saying:
Microsoft Bing is leveraging the latest advancements in AI to provide a dramatically better search experience for people across the world. 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.
The specific financial terms of this new collaboration between Oracle and Microsoft were not disclosed.