Microsoft’s Bing conversational-search inference was set to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI infrastructure alongside Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure under a multiyear agreement Oracle announced on November 7, 2023. Oracle described Azure services orchestrating OCI compute through Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure; the announcement did not say OCI replaced Azure or handled every Bing search.
What did Oracle announce about Bing?
Oracle said Microsoft was using OCI AI infrastructure together with Azure AI infrastructure to run inference for models optimized to power Bing conversational searches. Oracle described clusters supporting the evaluation and analysis of search results by Bing’s inference model. The announcement specified a multiyear agreement, but disclosed neither the share of search traffic involved nor the number of GPUs assigned to Bing.
Microsoft’s Divya Kumar, then global head of marketing for Search & AI, said the collaboration and use of OCI alongside Azure AI infrastructure would “expand access to customers and improve the speed of many of our search results.” That is Microsoft’s stated expectation in Oracle’s announcement, not a published benchmark or independently measured outcome. Oracle’s November 7, 2023 announcement also quotes Oracle executive Karan Batta describing the company’s broader effort to provide OCI AI capabilities.
How do OCI and Azure work together?
Oracle named Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure as the connection between the cloud environments. It said Microsoft could use managed Azure services, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to orchestrate OCI Compute at scale over that interconnect. In practical terms, the announcement describes Azure services coordinating compute resources hosted in OCI; it does not publish the deployment’s detailed network design or operational configuration.
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What is OCI Supercluster?
Oracle describes OCI Superclusters as a combination of OCI Compute Bare Metal instances, ultra-low-latency remote direct memory access (RDMA) cluster networking, and a choice of high-performance computing storage. Oracle presented the platform as infrastructure for large AI workloads, including inference.
Oracle’s 2023 announcement gave these figures for the service’s stated maximum capacity—not for Microsoft’s disclosed Bing deployment:
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| OCI Supercluster figure | What Oracle stated |
|---|---|
| Bare-metal compute | Up to 4,096 OCI Compute Bare Metal instances |
| GPU capacity | Up to 32,768 A100 GPUs or 16,384 H100 GPUs |
| Storage | Petabytes of high-performance clustered file-system storage; Oracle did not state a more precise capacity in the announcement |
Oracle also said inference models generally require thousands of compute and storage instances and tens of thousands of GPUs operating in parallel over a multiterabit network. That is Oracle’s general description of such workloads, not a measured specification for Bing. The figures and characterizations above come from Oracle’s announcement and its November 8, 2023 Oracle Blog Brasil post.
Does Microsoft use Oracle Cloud instead of Azure for Bing?
No. Oracle’s announcement says Microsoft uses OCI alongside Azure AI infrastructure. It does not claim that OCI replaced Azure, that every Bing search runs on OCI, or that the entire Bing service depends exclusively on Oracle. InfoWorld’s November 7, 2023 report likewise describes the arrangement as a combination of Azure and OCI for inference supporting Bing conversational searches.
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How is this different from Oracle Database@Azure?
Oracle Database@Azure is a separate partnership announced by Microsoft and Oracle on September 14, 2023. It makes Oracle database services running on OCI available in Azure datacenters; it is not the Bing inference arrangement. Microsoft’s announcement describes that separate offering in its Oracle Database@Azure announcement.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What is known about the arrangement now?
The cited announcements and report document what Oracle said in November 2023. They do not establish whether Microsoft’s deployment or service configuration remains unchanged today. They also do not provide workload-specific benchmarks, costs, latency measurements, reliability results, or a comparative performance assessment of OCI and Azure.
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