Oracle Keeps Growing Cloud Footprint With Ampere After Stake Sale

Less than a month after Oracle sold its stake in Ampere Computing, the tech giant is launching new public cloud instances powered by the chip designer’s custom, Arm-compatible processors, calling the move a ‘significant step forward in Oracle’s Arm journey.’

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is launching the first public cloud instances powered by Ampere Computing’s custom, Arm-compatible AmpereOne M processors after the tech giant sold its minority stake in the chip designer to SoftBank Group.

The Austin, Texas-based company on Monday called the launch of its Ampere-powered A4 Standard cloud instances a “significant step forward in Oracle’s Arm journey,” saying that they will deliver up to 61 percent better per-core performance and 20 percent higher boost frequency across most applications compared to its Ampere-based A2 instances.

[Related: How Arm Is Winning Over AWS, Google, Microsoft And Nvidia In Data Centers]

Oracle cited Uber and the Oracle Red Bull Racing Formula 1 team as two early A4 customers, adding that “more than 1,000 customers worldwide have realized” the performance and efficiency gains of its Arm-based instances since they launched in 2021.

The A4 launch comes less than a month after Japanese investment giant SoftBank bought ownership of Ampere from Oracle and other stakeholders for $6.5 billion to further its AI ambitions as the firm pursues major AI infrastructure projects like the Stargate Project.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and CTO, explained last week that his company sold its stake in Ampere “because we no longer think it is strategic for us to continue design, manufacturing and using our own chips in our cloud data centers.”

As a result, he said, Oracle is “now committed to a policy of chip neutrality where we work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers.”

“Of course, we will continue to buy the latest GPUs from Nvidia, but we need to be prepared and able to deploy whatever chips our customers want to buy,” said Ellison in a statement. “There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years and we must remain agile in response to those changes.”

Whereas Oracle’s last-generation A2 instances are powered by the standard AmpereOne processors—which only support eight channels of DDR5 memory—the new A4 instances take advantage of the AmpereOne M’s 12 memory channels to deliver two times higher memory bandwidth, according to the company.

Oracle said this makes the new A4 instances “ideal for memory-intensive workloads such as in-memory databases and large language model inferencing.”

In citing demand for its Ampere-based instances, Oracle said that Uber now runs more than 20 percent of its total Oracle Cloud Infrastructure capacity on Ampere processors, which has allowed the ride-share giant to slash infrastructure costs and reduce power consumption by 30 percent. Uber has previously said that it also uses Google Cloud as part of its push to embrace the economical and supply chain benefits of Arm-based computing.