• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 14, 2024

Microsoft is making investments in infrastructure to dominate the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and to increase its presence in advertising.

Larry Ellison, Oracle founder, spoke following the release of the company's fiscal Q3 earnings earlier this week, and said Oracle is preparing to put its cloud infrastructure in three additional Microsoft data centers.

Oracle has been a provider of database services, but has shifted to provide cloud infrastructure.

Ellison said last year that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was being installed in 20 Microsoft data centers. On Monday's call, he told analysts that number could increase.

That number of servers would not be cheap.

The companies have been working closely for several months, with Microsoft renting GPUs from Oracle to run artificial intelligence (AI) in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, according to one report.

On Thursday, the companies revealed the expanded availability of the Oracle Database@Azure service that enable users to access Oracle services running on OCI in Azure data centers.

The partnership adds five additional regions, including a first German region in Frankfurt. It marks the debut of Oracle Database@Azure in Europe, and the second region after Microsoft Azure East US general availability in December 2023.

Microsoft continues to make many changes as it begins to integrate AI across its product lines.

During Microsoft’s monthly product meeting a company executive ran through several updates. For example, advertisers in 32 markets can now buy Display ads directly in the Microsoft Advertising Platform to reach specific customers across more platforms with ads.

While not mentioned during the update, Hana Kobzová posted on X that Microsoft Advertising is testing a different online interface. “It is modern, sleek & fast and very similar to Google Ads," she wrote in a blog post.

“Microsoft's AI chat assistant Copilot features its own icon in the top horizontal menu, which, when clicked, opens a chat window on the right side,” she wrote. “Additionally, it's integrated into the search bar, and interacting with it also opens the chat window on the right.”

Microsoft also recently announced that Copilot for Security will become generally available worldwide on April 1.

The platform uses generative AI to help security and IT professionals catch what others miss, move faster, and strengthen team expertise.

Copilot is informed by more than 78 trillion security signals processed by Microsoft daily.