The landscape of artificial intelligence in the enterprise is rapidly evolving, driven by powerful collaborations that aim to make AI more accessible, secure, and impactful for businesses worldwide. A significant development on this front is the expanded partnership between Oracle and NVIDIA, poised to redefine how organizations harness AI capabilities. This alliance brings together cutting-edge hardware and deeply integrated software to embed AI at the very core of business data.
Oracle and NVIDIA have expanded their partnership to make enterprise AI services more available, powerful, and practical. The announcements, made during Oracle AI World, cover everything from monstrously powerful new hardware to deeply integrated software that aims to put AI at the very core of a company’s data. This collaboration promises to unlock new levels of efficiency and innovation for enterprises navigating the complexities of modern AI.
Supercharging Enterprise AI with OCI Zettascale10
At the heart of this partnership’s hardware innovations lies the formidable OCI Zettascale10 computing cluster. This next-generation platform is engineered to handle the most demanding AI training and inference workloads, leveraging the immense power of NVIDIA GPUs. It represents a leap forward in accelerated computing, designed to meet the growing computational needs of enterprise AI.
The headline announcement is the new OCI Zettascale10 computing cluster. This platform is accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs and engineered for the kind of AI training and inference workloads that would make a normal server weep. With a mighty 16 zettaflops of peak AI compute performance, this cluster offers unparalleled processing power for complex AI models.
To ensure seamless data flow and prevent bottlenecks, the OCI Zettascale10 is knitted together with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Ethernet. This advanced networking fabric is specifically designed to stop GPUs from sitting around waiting for data, allowing organisations to scale up to millions of processors efficiently. Such infrastructure is crucial for realizing the full potential of large-scale enterprise AI deployments.
Ian Buck, VP of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing at NVIDIA, said: “Through this latest collaboration, Oracle and NVIDIA are marking new frontiers in cutting-edge accelerated computing—streamlining database AI pipelines, speeding data processing, powering enterprise use cases and making inference easier to deploy and scale on OCI.” This vision underscores the integrated approach to making AI practical for businesses.
Mahesh Thiagarajan, Executive VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, commented: “OCI Zettascale10 delivers multi‑gigawatt capacity for the most challenging AI workloads with NVIDIA’s next-generation GPU platform. In addition, the native availability of NVIDIA AI Enterprise on OCI gives our joint customers a leading AI toolset close at hand to OCI’s 200+ cloud services, supporting a long tail of customer innovation.” This emphasizes not just the raw power, but also the rich ecosystem of tools available.
Bringing AI Directly to Your Data: The Oracle AI Database 26ai
While hardware power is essential, the true innovation lies in how AI integrates with an organization’s most critical asset: its data. Oracle is spearheading a paradigm shift with its “AI for Data” vision, challenging the conventional wisdom of moving data to AI models. Instead, the focus is on bringing AI capabilities directly to the database, enhancing security and efficiency.
The foundation of this new strategy is the Oracle AI Database 26ai. For years, the conventional wisdom was to move your data to where the AI models are. Oracle is flipping that on its head, arguing that it’s far more secure and efficient to bring the AI to your data. This latest database release is the embodiment of that “AI for Data” vision, ensuring data remains protected within its trusted environment.
Juan Loaiza, Executive VP of Oracle Database Technologies at Oracle, said: “By architecting AI and data together, Oracle AI Database makes ‘AI for Data’ simple to learn and simple to use. We enable our customers to easily deliver trusted AI insights, innovations, and productivity for all their data, everywhere, including both operational systems and analytic data lakes.” This integration simplifies complex AI processes for businesses.
One of the standout features is the ability to run agentic AI workflows inside your database. These sophisticated AI agents can tackle complex questions by combining your enterprise’s private, sensitive data with public information, all without ever having to move that private data outside your secure environment. This is a game-changer for data privacy and compliance.
This capability is made possible by features like a Unified Hybrid Vector Search, which lets the AI look for context across all your data types, whether it’s in a relational table, a JSON file, or a spatial map. The database also implements NIST-approved quantum-resistant algorithms for data both in-flight and at-rest, a critical defence against “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks.
Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, commented: “Great AI needs great data. With Oracle AI Database 26ai, customers get both. It’s the single place where their business data lives—current, consistent, and secure. And it’s the best place to use AI on that data without moving it. To help simplify and accelerate AI adoption, AI Database 26ai includes impressive new AI features that go beyond AI Vector Search. A highlight is Oracle’s architecting agentic AI into the database, enabling customers to build, deploy, and manage their own in-database AI agents using a no-code visual platform that includes pre-built agents.”
The new database is designed to work seamlessly with NVIDIA’s toolset. Its programming interfaces can now plug directly into NVIDIA NeMo Retriever, a collection of microservices that handle the complicated plumbing of modern AI for an enterprise. This integration makes it far easier for developers to implement things like retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. In simple terms, RAG allows a language model to look up relevant facts in your company documents before it answers a question, making its responses far more accurate and useful for businesses.
Further enhancing this synergy, the Oracle Private AI Services Container will also get a GPU-powered boost. This container lets businesses run AI models in their own secure environment. Soon, it will be able to offload the heavy lifting of creating vector embeddings – a core task for AI search – to powerful NVIDIA GPUs using the cuVS library. This promises to slash the time it takes to prepare data for AI applications, significantly accelerating AI development cycles.
Democratizing Enterprise AI Development with Integrated Tools
Beyond the advanced database, the Oracle and NVIDIA partnership aims to simplify the entire AI pipeline, making sophisticated AI more accessible to data scientists and developers. This involves integrating GPU acceleration into commonly used data platforms and centralizing AI development tools.
The new Oracle AI Data Platform now includes a built-in NVIDIA GPU option and the NVIDIA RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark. For data scientists and engineers, this is a big deal. It means they can speed up their data processing and machine learning workflows using powerful NVIDIA GPUs, often without having to change a single line of their existing code, dramatically improving performance for critical tasks.
All of these tools and capabilities are being consolidated within the Oracle AI Hub. The idea is to give organisations a single place to build, deploy, and manage their AI solutions. From the hub, users can deploy NVIDIA’s NIM microservices – which are like pre-packaged AI skills – through a simple, no-code interface. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry for developing and deploying AI applications.
To lower the barrier to entry even further, the full NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite is now natively available within the OCI Console. This means that a developer can spin up a GPU instance and enable all the necessary NVIDIA tools with a few clicks, rather than going through a separate procurement process. It’s a small change that makes a big difference in how quickly teams can get started on their AI projects.
Conclusion
The expanded partnership between Oracle and NVIDIA represents a concerted effort to tackle the real-world challenges businesses face in adopting and scaling AI. By harmonizing state-of-the-art hardware, secure in-database AI capabilities, and a comprehensive suite of development tools, this collaboration paves the way for a new era of enterprise AI. It’s clear that by bringing the hardware, the data, and the software tools into one cohesive ecosystem, Oracle and NVIDIA are making a case that the era of practical, secure, and scalable enterprise AI has well and truly arrived, empowering organizations to innovate faster and more securely.
