Oracle cloud seen as 'well positioned' to support AI high-performance needs
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Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) has received attention as of late for its cloud-related initiatives and with recent advancements in artificial intelligence, the company looks to be "well positioned" to support the technology's growing demands, investment Monness Crespi Hardt said.
Analyst Brian White, who has a buy rating on Oracle (ORCL), said the AI innovations that have been introduced in recent weeks bode well for the IT giant, pointing to Nvidia's (NVDA) introduction of its DGX Cloud and the fact that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would be the first cloud provider to host the cloud.
Nvidia's (NVDA) DGX Cloud will also be supported by Microsoft's (MSFT) Azure, Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) Cloud Platform and the 800-pound gorilla in the space, Amazon's (AMZN) AWS.
However, it's Oracle's (ORCL) move to be first to support the DGX Cloud that caught White's attention, given it will provide a remote direct memory access, or RDMA, network with bare-metal compute and high performance local and block storage that can grow to contain more than 32,000 GPUs.
The story of Oracle's (ORCL) push into the cloud and specifically, AI, goes back a few years when the company was supporting use cases for auto companies in areas such as crash simulations. Many automakers used Oracle's capabilities then, White pointed out, whetting the appetite for its prowess with the RDMA network. 
The auto companies discovered that Oracle's (ORCL) cloud infrastructure ran the simulations than its competitors, due in large part to its RDMA technology. Following that, Oracle (ORCL) learned that neural networks and machine learning workloads moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, due to its speed and other benefits.
Company co-founder Larry Ellison recently said the company's second-generation cloud is "quite different" than its competitors, largely due to the fact that it has an RDMA network and a non-blocking RDMA network, offering full bisection bandwidth to all hosts.
"Our network is very much faster than the other guysâ network," Ellison said last month on the company's earnings call. "What this means is if youâre running a large group of NVIDIA GPUs in a cluster, doing a large AI problem at Oracle, we can build these AI clusters, these NVIDIA GPU clusters, and run them." 
Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) still grab the majority of attention as it pertains to the cloud, with Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) coming in third, but given Oracle's (ORCL) increased technological gains, it may not be long before it joins its larger competitors in investor's eyes.