Oracle Invests Billions in AMD MI355X Accelerators to Challenge NVIDIA’s AI Dominance
Nvidia still dominates the AI chip market with a market share of more than 90%, but its number one competitor, AMD, is trying to shake this dominance with the new generation of the Instinct MI355X GPU series.
During Oracle’s fiscal 2025 Q3 conference call, Larry Ellison, the company’s chairman and CTO, revealed, “In the third quarter, we signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with AMD to build a 30,000-piece MI355X AI cluster.”
When asked by analysts, Ellison explained the company’s strengths: “We can build giant AI clusters that are faster and more cost-effective than our competitors. Under the hourly billing model, the speed advantage directly translates into a cost advantage, which is the secret of our big orders.“
Next-Generation AI Acceleration
Benchmarked against the NVIDIA B100/B200 and expected to be available in mid-2025, the AMD MI355X is based on TSMC’s 3nm process and the new CDNA 4 architecture. It comes equipped with 288GB of HBM3E storage, up to 8TB/s bandwidth, and the capability to support both FP4 and FP6 data types, further improving AI training and inference performance while maintaining computational accuracy.
Oracle’s Strategic Data Center Approach
Ellison also discussed Oracle’s data center strategy: “We take a ‘small step, run’ model—build small data centers and scale up as needed. After all, a vacant data center is a gold-swallowing behemoth, and it is difficult to withstand even a half-full state.”
In addition, Ellison discussed the super AI project, codenamed Stargate: “We are building a liquid-cooled cluster of 64,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs, which is probably the largest AI training project in the world, and the first major contract is about to land.”
Financial Performance
According to the financial report, Oracle’s total revenue in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 was US$14.130 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6%, and a year-on-year increase of 8% excluding the impact of exchange rate changes. Net income was $2,936 million, up 22% year-over-year, or 27% year-on-year, excluding the impact of exchange rate changes. Adjusted net income was $4,231 million, up 6% year-over-year, also up 9% before the impact of currency changes.
