In a significant development for cloud services and artificial intelligence, Microsoft has partnered with Oracle to enhance its search engine Bing's capabilities. Oracle's robust cloud infrastructure is set to augment Bing, particularly its Bing Chat AI conversational search functionality, through a multi-year agreement that combines Oracle's advanced hardware with Microsoft's Azure AI.
Oracle Technology Underpinning Bing
Under the terms of the agreement, Oracle will supply its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to support Bing's growing demand. OCI's Superclusters are a key aspect of this provision, which includes large-scale computing resources capable of processing massively parallel applications. These superclusters feature OCI Compute Bare Metal instances, RDMA cluster networking for ultra-low latency communication, and a choice between high-capacity storage solutions such as HPC storage or clustered file systems. The potential scale reaches up to 4,096 OCI Compute Bare Metal instances equipped with up to 32,768 A100 GPUs or 16,384 H100 GPUs, alongside petabyte-level storage.
The integration of Oracle's technology will allow Microsoft to use the Azure Kubernetes Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, granting the ability to scale up to meet increasing Bing conversational search traffic. This move indicates Microsoft's plan to significantly improve the search experience by leveraging artificial intelligence advancements and expanding customer access.
Microsoft's Commitment to Enhanced Search
Divya Kumar, the global head of marketing for Search and AI at Microsoft, indirectly underscored the importance of this partnership. Kumar highlighted that Microsoft Bing intends to transform the search experience globally through advanced AI. The collaboration with Oracle, coupled with Microsoft's Azure AI infrastructure, is set to facilitate swifter and more expansive search result delivery to users.
While the precise financial details of the collaboration remain confidential, the announcement underscores a strategic enhancement to Bing's conversational search capabilities by utilizing Oracle's powerful cloud infrastructure. This collaboration reflects both companies' commitment to delivering leading-edge technology solutions within the competitive landscape of AI-driven cloud services.
Microsoft and Oracle are long-standing partners, and the idea of expanding the collaboration become likely in September. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison visited Microsoft's headquarters to announce the bigger partnership between the two companies. This integration will enable organizations to utilize Oracle's database software on Azure, eliminating the need to set up Oracle hardware in their premises or resort to Oracle's public cloud. The co-location of Oracle's equipment in Azure data centers ensures rapid data access for applications.
