Oracle Buys Tens of Thousands of Nvidia A100, H100 GPUs
Oracle on Tuesday announced plans to deploy tens of thousands of Nvidia’s top A100 and H100 computing GPUs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The A100 and H100 GPUs will be made available to Oracle’s cloud customers for AI workloads powered by Nvidia’s AI software. The exact terms of the deal remain a secret, but we’re talking about a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
A new collaboration between Nvidia and Oracle will make AI training, computer vision, data processing, deep learning inference and simulation accessible to all enterprise customers. You don’t need to invest heavily to deploy your data center with Nvidia’s expensive computing GPUs. Oracle has already given OCI clients access to high-performance computing instances and will now offer a range of AI capabilities.
Oracle’s OCI enterprise client can access all of Nvidia’s AI platforms, including:
- AI Enterprise — A set of engines for AI model training, compute vision, conversational AI, data processing, recommendation systems, simulation, and more.
- RAPIDS — Acceleration of Apache Spark data processing on OCI Data Flow fully managed Apache Spark service, including bare metal instances such as BM.GPU.GM4.8 with A100 Tensor Core GPU.
- Clara — Medical Imaging, Genomics, Natural Language Processing, and Drug Discovery (coming soon).
Nvidia’s A100 and H100 computing GPUs are fairly expensive. Even the previous-generation A100 computing GPUs cost between $10,000 and $15,000 depending on the exact configuration, and the next-generation H100 offering promises to be even more expensive. While you’re unlikely to buy at retail price, you’re still paying a premium for Nvidia hardware and software.
Bearing in mind we’re talking about tens of thousands of computing GPUs, in addition to Nvidia’s NVLink switches and possibly data processing units, the deal between Nvidia and Oracle is expected to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a highly unprecedented deal, and in any case, cooperation with Oracle is vital for his Nvidia. Because it will soon be unable to sell computing CPUs to Chinese customers.
Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, said: