OpenAIthe company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, has struck a deal with Oracle to increase its computing capacity for artificial intelligence. The goal is to respond to growing demand for services and prevent future service disruptions.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has repeatedly emphasized the need for a more robust infrastructure to power its services. The company has seen a rapid increase in popularity, with millions of users using ChatGPT to generate text, translate languages, and write different types of creative content.
To date, OpenAI has relied exclusively on Microsoft for its computing needs. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI and gained the exclusive right to license its technology. However, demand for OpenAI’s services has grown to such an extent that the computing capacity provided by Microsoft is no longer sufficient.
The agreement with Oracle will allow OpenAI to use the Microsoft Azure AI platform on Oracle’s infrastructure. This means that OpenAI will be able to leverage Oracle’s computing power and global data center network to run its AI models more efficiently and scalably. However, this operation could create tensions with Microsoft, OpenAI’s historic partner.
OpenAI tried to reassure its partner, stating in a post on X (in VIA) that the “strategic relationship with Microsoft for cloud computing remains unchanged”. The new partnership with Oracle, according to OpenAI, will only serve to “integrate the Azure AI platform on the OCI infrastructure [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] for inference and other needs”. OpenAI also clarified that pre-training its frontier models “continues to happen on supercomputers built in collaboration with Microsoft”.
Irony of fate, Oracle provides the infrastructure to xAI, the artificial intelligence solution founded by Elon Musk and born as a response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
