Microsoft leases graphics chips from Oracle to support Bing's growth with generative AI

Microsoft has entered into a multi-year agreement with Oracle to lease powerful computing resources. This is necessary to expand the use of artificial intelligence models in the Bing search engine.

Here's What We Know

Microsoft was one of the first to integrate a generative chatbot with artificial intelligence into its search engine, launching Bing Chat in February this year. Such models require huge amounts of computing power to train and run.

Oracle has tens of thousands of GPUs that can be used for this purpose. They will be leveraged alongside Microsoft's infrastructure to extend customer access to Bing's AI features.

The collaboration is based on the Oracle Interconnect service, which enables the pooling of cloud platform resources. It has previously been used to enable Oracle databases and Microsoft applications to work together.

Now this mechanism will help to scale Oracle's GPU clusters to meet the growing demand for Bing's AI services. The exact number of leased resources has not been disclosed.

As of October 2023, Bing's global search market share was 3.1 per cent. That's down from Google, but up from a month earlier. On desktops, Bing's share reached 9.1 per cent.

Source: Oracle