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oracle (NYSE:ORCL) has received attention of late for its cloud-related initiatives, and with recent advances in artificial intelligence, the company appears to be “well positioned” to support the growing demands on the technology, investment Monness Crespi Hardt saying.
Analyst Brian White, who has a Buy rating on Oracle (ORCL), said the AI innovations being introduced in recent weeks bode well for the IT giant, noting Nvidia’s (NVDA) introduction of its DGX Cloud and the fact that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would be the first cloud provider to host the cloud.
Nvidia’s (NVDA) DGX Cloud will also support Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) Cloud Platform, and the 800-pound gorilla in space, Amazon (AMZN) AWS.
However, it’s Oracle’s (ORCL) move to be first to support DGX Cloud that caught White’s attention, as it will provide a Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, network with full compute and storage locally and in high-performance block that can grow to contain more than 32,000 GPUs.
The history of Oracle’s (ORCL) push into the cloud, and specifically AI, goes back a few years, when the company was supporting use cases for automotive companies in areas like crash simulations. Many automakers used Oracle’s capabilities back then, White said, whetting an appetite for its RDMA network prowess.
Automotive companies found that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (ORCL) ran the simulations than its competitors, due in large part to its RDMA technology. After that, Oracle (ORCL) learned that machine learning and neural network workloads were moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, due to its speed and other benefits.
The company’s co-founder, Larry Ellison, recently said that the company’s second-generation cloud is “quite different” from its competitors, largely due to the fact that it has both an RDMA network and a non-blocking RDMA network, which offers full bisection bandwidth to all hosts.
“Our network is much faster than everyone else’s network,” Ellison said last month on the company’s earnings call. “What this means is if you’re running a large group of NVIDIA GPUs in a cluster, doing a large AI problem in Oracle, we can build these AI clusters, these NVIDIA GPU clusters, and run them.”
Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) continue to get the most attention when it comes to cloud, with Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) in third place, but given Oracle’s (ORCL) higher technology gains, it may It won’t be long before it joins its biggest competitors in the eyes of investors.