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.
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.”
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.
OCI Zettascale10 promises a mighty 16 zettaflops of peak AI compute performance and is knitted together with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Ethernet, a networking fabric designed specifically to stop GPUs from sitting around waiting for data, allowing organisations to scale up to millions of processors efficiently.
But raw power is only half the story. The real substance of this partnership lies in the software integrations that aim to weave AI into every layer of a business’s operations.
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.”
Giving your Oracle database a brain with AI
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.
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.”
One of the standout features is the ability to run agentic AI workflows inside your database. The 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 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.
Oracle is also clearly thinking about the long game with security. The new database implements NIST-approved quantum-resistant algorithms for data both in-flight and at-rest. It’s a defence against “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where hackers steal encrypted data today with the hope of breaking it with future quantum computers.
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 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 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.
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.
Democratising enterprise AI
Beyond the database, the partnership aims to simplify the entire AI pipeline. 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 GPUs, often without having to change a single line of their existing code.
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.
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.
It’s clear that this collaboration is aimed at solving the real-world challenges businesses face when trying to adopt AI. 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.
See also: Cisco: Only 13% have a solid AI strategy and they’re lapping rivals
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