Microsoft is said to be switching off Oracle’s AI computers. Microsoft has not said it

Bloomberg reported on 6 November, citing people familiar with the matter, that Microsoft is winding down an arrangement to rent artificial-intelligence computing from Oracle. The same account says Microsoft has been turning the rented machines off in recent months, after it declined to renew the contract, and that the capacity became less useful because the Oracle hardware used an older generation of Nvidia chips. Reuters carried Bloomberg’s account. Microsoft did not answer Reuters. A person familiar is not a Microsoft statement.

Oracle did speak. A spokesperson told Reuters: “Demand for OCI’s AI infrastructure remains strong, including for earlier-generation GPUs.” Strong is the company’s word. It is not a figure for how many chips Microsoft has switched off, or what the rent was worth. Bloomberg put the move inside a wider look at billions of dollars of cloud partnerships. Billions is the scale of that review, as Bloomberg framed it, not a price on this contract. Oracle announced the multi-year deal in 2023 and said Microsoft would use the computers for the AI version of Bing. That announcement did not state a sum or a capacity.