Oracle's latest earnings call has served as an eye-opener of sorts for AI skeptics, with the company taking pains to assert that the demand for data centers is still "outstripping supply." What's more, some of Oracle's upcoming facilities are truly mind-boggling, employing NVIDIA's GPUs at a scale that has never been seen before.
Oracle's Q1 FY2025 Earnings Call
$ORCL Oracle Q1 FY25 (ending in August).
• RPO +53% Y/Y to $99B.
CEO Safra Catz:
"That strong contract backlog will increase revenue growth throughout FY25. But the biggest news of all was signing a MultiCloud agreement with AWS."
• Revenue +7% Y/Y to $13.3B ($60M beat).
•… pic.twitter.com/AtXD39JSox— App Economy Insights (@EconomyApp) September 9, 2024
For the quarter that ended on the 31st of August, Oracle reported solid results a few hours back, managing to beat consensus expectations on both its top-line and bottom-line metrics. What's more the company's AI-critical cloud division recorded an year-over-year growth of 21 percent.
Oracle has more demand than supply, scaling through the same AI automation they sell. The key? Repeating the exact same process—just like Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites or In-N-Out burgers, every data center is identical no matter the location. Consistency at scale. $ORCL $nvda pic.twitter.com/VCeACF7Dyc
— Ben Pouladian (@benitoz) September 9, 2024
During the accompanying earnings call, Oracle wowed investors by noting that the demand for its products and services, particularly in the cloud sphere, was "still outstripping supply" and that the company was now trying to overcome this deficit by "laying out a lot of supply."
Apart from building a lot of data centers, Oracle is also rolling out services such as GenAI Agents, which combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval-augmented generation technology, allowing clients to directly interact with their cloud-stored data in new and innovative ways.
Oracle To Deploy 131,072 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs
$ORCL's Larry Ellison on AI market growth:
"..I mean these AI models, these frontier models are going to -- the entry price for a real frontier model from someone who wants to compete in that area is about $100 billion. Let me repeat, around $100 billion. That's over the next 4,… pic.twitter.com/QEyeiLLI3Y
— AlphaSense (@AlphaSenseInc) September 9, 2024
According to Oracle, building a foundational model such as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini from scratch will now cost $100 billion "over the next 4, 5 years."
Therefore, Oracle believes that the next big growth in AI-related spending will come from the inference process:
"So that goes on, and we'll see more and more applications look at that. So I wouldn't -- if your horizon is over the next 5 years, maybe even the next 10 years, I wouldn't worry about, hey, we've now trained all the models we need and all we need to do is inferencing. I think this is an ongoing battle for technical supremacy that will be fought by a handful of companies and maybe one nation state over the next 5 years at least, but probably more like 10. So this business is just growing larger and larger and larger. There's no slowdown or shift coming."
This growing demand paradigm is, of course, bullish for Oracle's medium-term prospects.
📣 JUST IN: $NVDA NVIDIA and $ORCL Oracle Collaborate to Power Next-Gen AI and Data Processing for Enterprises
👉 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬:
📍 𝐍𝐕𝐈𝐃𝐈𝐀 and 𝐎𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐥𝐞 to launch zettascale 𝐎𝐂𝐈 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 with over 100,000 GPUs.
📍 New infrastructure… pic.twitter.com/R8UHIo4IID
— Hardik Shah (@AIStockSavvy) September 11, 2024
Also, Oracle has just announced a "zettascale" supercluster that "can scale up to 131,072 Blackwell GPUs with NVIDIA ConnectX-7 NICs for RoCEv2 or NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking to deliver an astounding 2.4 zettaflops of peak AI compute to the cloud."
This new supercluster is expected to come online by next year and will help clients train and deploy next-gen AI models.
LOL, $ORCL CEO blew my mind by saying this about how big tech companies think when they are building data centers.
"So we're in the middle of designing a data center that's north of the gigawatt that has -- but we found the location and the power place we look at it, they've… pic.twitter.com/Boaz6SH86z
— Jose Najarro Stocks (@_JoseNajarro) September 10, 2024
Finally, do note that Oracle is planning to build as many as 2,000 data centers, constituting a phenomenal increase from its current capacity of 160! Also, one such facility will consume at least a "gigawatt" of power and will be powered by as many as three small-scale nuclear reactors (SMRs).
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