Powering intelligence: Oracle’s new AI playbook

Artificial Intelligence will not replace humans—it will amplify their ability to solve complex, global challenges. This was the central theme of Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison’s keynote at Oracle AI World 2025, held in Las Vegas. Framing AI as the next Industrial Revolution, Ellison argued that AI’s most important breakthroughs will happen not in internet search or chatbots, but in healthcare, climate, agriculture, and financial systems.

“The real opportunity is not just building these extraordinary electronic brains, but using them to solve humanity’s most difficult problems,” Ellison said. He emphasised that the rise of AI necessitates more than just algorithms. It demands a robust and resilient digital infrastructure, capable of supporting a new kind of reasoning system.

To meet these demands, Oracle is expanding its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) footprint, including a new AI supercluster in Abilene, Texas. This cluster will ultimately house over 450,000 NVIDIA GPUs and integrate its own power plants, high-speed fibre networks, and industrial-scale liquid cooling systems. “We are building billion-watt power plants and connecting them directly to our data centres,” Ellison said, calling it a new kind of infrastructure project—on par with railways and national grids.

Oracle's approach aims to unify AI infrastructure with real-world enterprise applications, enabling customers to securely run generative and reasoning AI models, including ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Llama, alongside their private datasets.

 Private Data, Not Just Public Models

A major focus across sessions at Oracle AI World was the shift from public, general-purpose AI to enterprise-specific reasoning systems. While current models rely heavily on public internet data, Oracle is betting on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and vector databases to allow customers to combine public knowledge with proprietary business data securely.

“ChatGPT does not know your accounts, your customer orders, or your supplier contracts,” Ellison said. Oracle’s AI Database and AI Data Platform are being developed to address this gap by enabling AI models to reason over private datasets in a secure and controlled way. This includes integration with third-party clouds and databases to create a seamless, multi-cloud AI architecture.

This capability is essential for industries where data sovereignty and privacy are non-negotiable. Healthcare, Ellison suggested, will be one of the earliest adopters. Oracle is enhancing its healthcare portfolio—from upgrading Cerner's EHR platform to deploying AI agents that recommend personalised treatments, automate reimbursement workflows, and manage receivables to improve hospital liquidity.

Beyond healthcare, Derek Gittoes, Vice President of Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle, noted that the shift to AI reasoning is also transforming operational systems in logistics, manufacturing, and fulfilment. “We are moving from predictive insights to actual decision execution,” he said. “The future is autonomous supply chains that respond in real time—not just suggest actions but take them—with full accountability and auditability.”

He added that Oracle’s agentic AI framework enables intelligent decisions by drawing data from ERP systems, IoT devices, and external sources. “Customers are becoming more comfortable allowing AI to make operational decisions—especially when governance, auditability, and control are built in from the start,” Gittoes said.

Ellison also outlined how biometric identity systems, combined with AI, could eliminate passwords, prevent fraud, and ensure privacy in digital healthcare. “Passwords are insane,” he said. “Biometric authentication and AI-driven credit verification could make digital identity and transactions more secure.”

In addition, remote patient monitoring via IoT devices and AI dashboards is enabling continuous care beyond hospitals. Meanwhile, AI-powered drones may soon support emergency responses by transporting medical samples, detecting wildfires, or guiding ambulances.

Making the Cloud Smaller and Smarter

The event also saw Oracle launch two infrastructure offerings—OCI Dedicated Region and Oracle Multicloud Universal Credits—designed to give enterprises greater control, flexibility, and scalability in how and where they deploy AI and cloud services. These innovations aim to meet growing demands for data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and cross-cloud operational consistency.

The OCI Dedicated Region is a more compact and modular version of Oracle’s dedicated cloud region. It allows organisations to deploy the full suite of Oracle public cloud services—including over 200 AI and SaaS offerings—within their own data centres, starting with as few as three racks. This makes it feasible for enterprises with limited physical space or strict regulatory requirements to run a sovereign cloud environment without compromising on capabilities or scale.

Fujitsu, an early adopter, noted that the compact deployment model enables it to serve customers more flexibly while maintaining control over its infrastructure. “With OCI Dedicated Region25 delivering the full range of OCI services via a small physical footprint inside our own data centres, we will be able to deploy apps and services quickly and easily to our customers,” said Kazushi Koga, Corporate Executive Officer, Fujitsu Limited.

Oracle claims it now has more than 60 OCI Dedicated Regions and Oracle Alloy regions either operational or in the planning stage globally, enabling customers to choose deployment models suited to their size and compliance needs without sacrificing performance, security, or public cloud parity.

To support multicloud operations, Oracle also introduced Multicloud Universal Credits. This new cross-cloud licensing model allows customers to consume OCI and Oracle AI Database services across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure under a single, unified commercial agreement. This simplifies procurement, streamlines governance, and provides portability for enterprise workloads running across different cloud environments.

“This is where our multicloud database architecture becomes critical,” said Nathan Thomas, Vice President of Multicloud at Oracle. “We deploy Oracle Exadata racks directly inside partner-cloud facilities, operating them as Oracle-managed child sites. This ensures identical performance and management across environments and gives customers the freedom to use any cloud’s AI pipeline while keeping their Oracle database architecture unchanged.”

Lakehouse and Networks for the AI Era

To support large-scale, enterprise-grade AI operations, Oracle launched the Autonomous AI Lakehouse, built on Oracle Autonomous AI Database and Apache Iceberg. The platform avoids data movement by supporting native Iceberg table access and integrating with data catalogues like Databricks Unity, AWS Glue, and Snowflake Polaris.

“Databricks is committed to open and interoperable data access for analytics and AI,” said Stephen Orban, SVP, Product Ecosystem and Partnerships, Databricks. “We welcome Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse’s integration with Unity Catalog, giving joint customers seamless access to their data and the flexibility to use Oracle and Databricks together.”

The Lakehouse platform includes natural language-to-SQL conversion via Select AI, a no-code Data Science Agent, plug-and-play SQL access to external catalogues, and the Data Lake Accelerator, which dynamically scales network and compute resources to enhance query performance.

SKY Brazil was among the first to test the accelerator. “It significantly improved query speeds on external data stored in object stores, enabling us to analyse large datasets faster and more efficiently—without moving data or changing our workflows,” said Rosiane Porto, Big Data, SKY Brazil. “We are excited about the potential of Data Lake Accelerator to simplify and accelerate external data processing for our business.”

Analyst firms say Oracle’s approach addresses long-standing gaps in fragmented data ecosystems. “Oracle’s support for Apache Iceberg with Autonomous AI Lakehouse means organisations get cutting-edge AI, high-octane analytics, and secure, open access—all in one shot,” said Ron Westfall, VP, HyperFRAME Research. “By wrapping a ‘catalogue of catalogues’ around Iceberg and its Autonomous AI Database, Oracle is making it radically simpler for teams to discover, secure, and leverage data everywhere.”

To ensure this architecture runs smoothly, Oracle introduced Oracle Acceleron. This new networking stack brings together dedicated fabrics, multi-planar routing, zero-trust host-level security, and a converged SmartNIC for faster and more secure data movement. These upgrades improve network resiliency, double storage IOPS, and enable direct encrypted flows across AI and high-performance workloads.

“Our customers want cloud infrastructure to help them innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and scale with confidence,” said Clay Magouyrk, CEO, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “These latest advances extend Oracle Acceleron to deliver uncompromised performance, scale, and security for any cloud workload.”

 Infrastructure as a Catalyst for Intelligence

As the Oracle AI World 2025 drew to a close, one message stood out clearly from Ellison’s keynote and the new announcements: AI’s success will not be measured by chat interfaces or search enhancements alone, but by how well it is integrated into the physical, financial, and operational infrastructure of everyday life.

Ellison’s vision is clear. The next era of cloud computing will be about intelligence, not just availability. It will be about systems that reason, not just respond. And it will be about enabling that intelligence to live securely within organisations—across sovereign borders, under enterprise control, and within critical workflows.

If Oracle delivers on this promise, the next few years could see AI becoming a deeply embedded, invisible force behind how we diagnose illness, grow food, protect data, and manage ecosystems. The company’s investments in AI-native infrastructure, open data platforms, and cross-cloud flexibility suggest a strategic shift from platform-building to problem-solving.

“AI will make us much better scientists, engineers, and doctors,” Ellison said. “It is not replacing us—it is extending what we can achieve.”

(Oracle hosted the author in Las Vegas to attend Oracle AI World 2025.)