Microsoft’s need for computational power to sustain its Bing AI services appears to be so substantial that the company intends to partially outsource the processing of incoming search queries to Oracle’s GPU clusters. According to a press release from Oracle, the two companies have recently entered into a multi-year agreement to address the “explosive growth of AI services.”
Under this agreement, Microsoft will gain access to Oracle’s AI infrastructure to integrate its resources with those of its own Azure Cloud. The primary focus is on AI inferencing, which involves the use of pre-trained language models, such as user queries to Microsoft’s Bing AI.
Microsoft aims to enhance the speed of its Bing AI
“Inference models require thousands of computational and storage instances and tens of thousands of GPUs that can work in parallel like a single supercomputer across a multi-terabit network,” Oracle explained in its announcement. The company highlights its ability to scale its GPU supercluster to up to 32,768 A100 or 16,384 H100 GPUs from Nvidia.
In addition, there is a high-performance clustered file system storage amounting to multiple petabytes for efficient processing of highly parallelized applications. The company’s RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) cluster network also offers extremely low latency.
“Our collaboration with Oracle and the use of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in conjunction with our Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure will expand access for customers and improve the speed of many of our search results,” stated Divya Kumar, Head of the Marketing team for Search and AI at Microsoft. However, the announcement does not specify the extent to which Microsoft intends to utilize Oracle’s resources for this purpose.
Oracle and Microsoft expand their collaboration
Just last month, Oracle and Microsoft announced a closer collaboration to physically integrate their cloud hardware and expedite the provisioning of Oracle’s database services within the Azure Cloud. Microsoft became the first external company to integrate Oracle’s database services into its own cloud data center, as declared by the Redmond-based software corporation.
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