NVIDIA, Oracle CEOs in Fireside Chat Light Pathways to Enterprise AI

by Rick Merritt
Safra Catz, Jensen Huang at Oracle World

Speeding adoption of enterprise AI and accelerated computing, Oracle CEO Safra Catz and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang discussed their companies’ expanding collaboration in a fireside chat live streamed today from Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas.

Oracle and NVIDIA announced plans to bring NVIDIA’s full accelerated computing stack to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA RAPIDS for Apache Spark and NVIDIA Clara for healthcare.

In addition, OCI will deploy tens of thousands more NVIDIA GPUs to its cloud service, including A100 and upcoming H100 accelerators.

“I’m unbelievably excited to announce our renewed partnership and the expanded capabilities our cloud has,” said Catz to a live and online audience of several thousand customers and developers.

“We’re thrilled you’re bringing your AI solutions to OCI,” she told Huang.

The Power of Two

The combination of Oracle’s heritage in data and its powerful infrastructure with NVIDIA’s expertise in AI will give users traction facing tough challenges ahead, Huang said.

“Industries around the world need big benefits from our industry to find ways to do more without needing to spend more or consume more energy,” he said.

OracleWorld audience in Lass Vegas
Panorama of the crowd at OracleWorld in Las Vegas.

AI and GPU-accelerated computing are delivering these benefits at a time when traditional methods of increasing performance are slowing, he added.

“Data that you harness to find patterns and relationships can automate the way you work and the products and services you deliver — the next ten years will be some of the most exciting times in our industry,” Huang said.

“I’m confident all workloads will be accelerated for better performance, to drive costs out and for energy efficiency,” he added.

The capability of today’s software and hardware, coming to the cloud, “is something we’ve dreamed about since our early days,” said Catz, who joined Oracle in 1999 and has been its CEO since 2014.

Benefits for Healthcare and Every Industry

“One of the most critical areas is saving lives,” she added, pointing to the two companies’ work in healthcare.

A revolution in digital biology is transforming healthcare from a science-driven industry to one powered by both science and engineering. And NVIDIA Clara provides a platform for that work, used by healthcare experts around the world, Huang said.

“We can now use AI to understand the language of proteins and chemicals, all the way to gene screening and quantum chemistry —  amazing breakthroughs are happening now,” he said.

AI promises similar advances for every business. The automotive industry, for example, is becoming a tech industry as it discovers its smartphone moment, he said.

“We see this all over with big breakthroughs in natural language processing and large language models that can encode human knowledge to apply to all kinds of skills they were never trained to do,” he said.