This week, OpenAI and Oracle shocked the markets with a surprise $300 billion, five-year agreement , part of a surge of new business that sent the cloud provider’s stock skyrocketing. But maybe the markets shouldn’t have been taken by surprise. The deal is a reminder that, despite Oracle’s legacy status, the company still plays a major role in AI infrastructure.

On the OpenAI side, the agreement was more revealing than the lack of details suggest. For one, the startup’s willingness to pay so much for compute provides a measurement of the startup’s appetite — even if it’s unclear where the electricity to power said compute is coming from or how it will pay for it.

Chirag Dekate, a vice president at research firm Gartner, told TechCrunch it’s clear why both sides were interested in this

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