Microsoft Use Oracle Cloud’s GPUs to Support Bing’s AI Computing Needs

November 10, 2023
Microsoft recently announced a partnership with Oracle to leverage the capabilities of Oracle Cloud’s GPUs and meet the growing artificial intelligence (AI) computing demands of Bing. This collaboration will enable Bing to enhance the search experience and deliver faster and more accurate results to users worldwide.
The Importance of AI in Bing’s Search Operations
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, introduced Bing Chat, a new AI-based feature that has garnered user attention since its launch. However, to sustain Bing’s AI features, Microsoft recognized the need to increase external computing power. This is where Oracle comes into play.
According to Karan Batta, Senior Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, generative AI represents a significant technological leap, and Bing is at the forefront of modern AI. Bing’s search engine requires “powerful clusters of computing infrastructure” to evaluate search results using OpenAI technology, a process traditionally known as inference.
The Significance of the Microsoft-Oracle Collaboration
To meet Bing’s AI computing needs, Microsoft has partnered with Oracle to harness the computing power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This collaboration will enable Bing to expand user access to its AI capabilities and improve the speed of many of its search results.
Microsoft will utilize Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure technology, allowing managed services running on Azure clusters to access resources within Oracle’s AI infrastructure. These superclusters can harness up to 32,768 Nvidia A100 GPUs or 16,384 H100 GPUs and petabytes of high-performance storage clusters to efficiently process highly parallel applications. The system communicates through a low-latency Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network.
Benefits for Bing and its Users
Thanks to this partnership with Oracle, Bing will be able to access the latest advances in generative AI algorithms and provide a significantly enhanced global search experience. This translates to more relevant, comprehensive, and faster search results for Bing users.
However, despite Bing’s efforts to improve its search experience and harness AI capabilities, according to the latest Statcounter data, Bing holds only a global market share of 3.11% compared to Google’s dominance with 91.55% in the online search sector. Nonetheless, Bing has a slightly better market share for desktop-based web searches, with 9.14% compared to Google’s 83.53%. Nevertheless, Bing’s presence in the online search market does not pose a significant threat to Google’s dominance.
In Conclusion
The partnership between Microsoft and Oracle represents a significant step in enhancing Bing’s AI computing capabilities and providing a better search experience for users. By leveraging the potential of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s GPUs, Bing will be able to process search results more quickly and efficiently, delivering more relevant and comprehensive results. However, despite these advancements, Bing will continue to face the challenge of competing with Google’s dominance in the online search sector.