Oracle posted third-quarter revenues of $12.4 billion at almost 18% year-over-year growth, but investors seemed dubious about how well the vendor's Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Gen 2 platform is performing compared to the economic slowdown many other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors are experiencing. "The difference is too stark," one investor noted.

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison recounted a conversation he had with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about how Oracle's Gen 2 cloud is much different than what other hyperscalers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer. According to Ellison, Oracle's non-blocking RDMA network "is very much faster than the other guys' network."

Ellison explained if a customer is running a large group of Nvidia GPUs in a cluster for an artificial intelligence (AI) problem, Oracle can build those AI clusters and Nvidia GPU clusters "dynamically" since the vendor's standard network supports large clustering of GPUs and the communication between them.

"We can create these groups of GPUs. We can marshal them together. The other guys can't do that. They can build clusters, but they actually literally are physically building a new cluster. They're building new hardware," he said. But Oracle's existing hardware and standard network can group GPUs dynamically to attack AI problems. "No one else can do that," Ellison claimed.

"We have a lot of business, a lot of new AI companies coming to Oracle because we're the only ones who can run their workloads. And by the way – we are cheaper," he added. "We're faster and we're cheaper."

Ellison cited Oracle's health care-focused partnership with MD Anderson hospital and independent software vendor Ronan "where we built these disease-specific AI modules that make recommendations to doctors about care," he said. "That's a big AI model that's built by MD Anderson working with Ronan running in the Oracle cloud."

The hospital has found that by using that AI system it can reduce hospital admissions and readmissions by 30%. "That's a stunning number," Ellison said. "People talk about ChatGPT being really cool because they can write my high school essay for me. Well, how about reducing the hospital readmissions at MD Anderson by 30%? You decide which is more important."

Ellison added this is one "example of where we're just way ahead of the other hyperscalers in terms of our network and our ability to do AI."

Another factor contributing to the cloud provider's "continued financial success" is the operational efficiency driven by its cloud offerings, CEO Safra Catz said.

Cloud isn't just about "renting commodity white boxes" anymore, the CEO noted. "It's about velocity and value," and "we have become the enterprise technology vendor of choice because we have products and services that help our customers drive cost efficiencies and modernize their businesses," she said.

The operating efficiency standard the vendor claims to set with its portfolio "helps customers see what's possible when they are working with us," Catz added.

And by using its own products and services, the vendor can increase its growth investments while maintaining profitability, Catz explained. "We started this ourselves over 20 years ago and have kept it up over all these years, resulting in the highest margins in the software business for decades."

Catz also touted Oracle's history of AI-based offerings, like Oracle AI, for supporting increased infrastructure performance and security without the need for human intervention. "On our Gen 2 OCI platform, the architecture and unique network capability has fast become the platform of choice for many AI companies because OCI runs workloads faster," Catz reiterated. "Time is money in the cloud, so coming to us saves our customers money."