Microsoft is winding down its use of Oracle AI cloud capacity after declining to renew a multi-year agreement, Bloomberg News reported Nov. 6; the computing resources had supported Bing conversational search.
Bloomberg said Microsoft's use of the rented capacity had been tapering in recent months. It reported the servers used older-generation Nvidia chips, which had become a weaker match for Microsoft's requirements. The Information separately reported that Microsoft did not renew the agreement.
Oracle announced the multi-year deal Nov. 7, 2023, saying Microsoft paired Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Azure to run AI inference for Bing conversational searches. Inference is the processing that lets a trained model respond to a prompt. Oracle's announcement did not give a financial value or a capacity figure.
Bloomberg placed the Oracle pullback within a wider reassessment of Microsoft's cloud partnerships. The reports did not quantify the financial effect of ending the arrangement for either company.
An Oracle spokesperson told Reuters demand for OCI's AI infrastructure remained strong, including for earlier-generation GPUs. The comment addressed overall demand and did not identify who might use capacity being phased out.
Neither Microsoft nor Oracle has publicly confirmed the reported nonrenewal.
