Oracle’s Cloud Strategy: Competing with AWS, Azure, and Google in the AI Era

For many years Oracle has lingered in the second tier of cloud service providers, far behind the three giants AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, which together command over 60% of the global cloud infrastructure market.

Nevertheless, Oracle is growing at an impressive 25% annual rate, generating more than $99 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter.

In the remaining 40% of the market, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure business posted $7.2 billion in revenue, a 28% year‑over‑year increase, and the company claims it is ready for the fast‑evolving AI era thanks to its combination of cloud infrastructure, extensive enterprise software, and a push to embed AI across its operations.

These points were emphasized by Oracle co‑founder and CTO Larry Ellison during his 90‑minute keynote at Oracle AI World 2025 in Las Vegas.

The event, known as Oracle Cloud World from 2022‑2024 and Oracle OpenWorld from 1997‑2021, highlighted OCI’s role in providing not only the infrastructure for AI workloads but also applications that allow organizations to run AI and “agent AI” workloads, securely bring proprietary data into a wide range of AI models, and link databases with the developer ecosystem.

Ellison described Oracle’s cloud as unique because it combines massive enterprise applications with large‑scale AI infrastructure, a combination he says none of the other hyperscale providers—Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—offer.

Oracle is also building a massive AI cluster in Abilene, Texas, for OpenAI, which will house over 450,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs across eight buildings on more than 1,000 acres, providing the capacity to support single workloads when needed.

Oracle’s new AI Data Platform lets enterprises run any model on OCI, including Grok from xAI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama, while allowing private and proprietary data—most of which already resides in Oracle databases—to be added to these models.

The platform vectorizes data from Oracle databases so AI models can access it in a usable format, enabling applications that connect entire industry ecosystems, with healthcare cited as a prime example.

Oracle also used AI to rewrite the entire codebase of Cerner, the medical‑technology company it acquired for over $28 billion in 2022.

Its new APEX tool leverages AI to automatically generate code, featuring a declarative AI‑generated language while still supporting traditional coding practices, and works alongside existing business applications.

Ellison asserts that Oracle’s AI now writes code based on high‑level intent, with Oracle engineers reviewing and monitoring the output, positioning the company to challenge the hyperscale cloud leaders by leveraging its strengths in databases, enterprise applications, and AI‑enabled cloud services.