By Mahesh Thiagarajan, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries and creating extraordinary opportunities for startups to thrive. For founders, AI offers vast potential—but maximizing that opportunity requires access to powerful, reliable, and affordable tools. This is where modern cloud computing proves invaluable.
Cloud infrastructure that integrates high throughput and low latency networking, storage, and the latest GPUs empowers startups to build, train, and deploy AI models without becoming distributed computing PhDs. These tools take on the heavy lifting, allowing founders to focus on solving meaningful problems, scaling their businesses, and bringing their ideas to life – faster.
As AI startups navigate a shifting landscape of privacy regulations, fierce competition for computing power, and pressure from industry incumbents, they face critical decisions about their infrastructure. Let’s explore the key considerations for success—and how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) delivers unmatched value, end-to-end capabilities, and robust computing power to help startups build, serve, and scale their AI models and applications cost-effectively.
Enterprise-Grade AI Power for Startups on Demand
First, Oracle gives startups access to some of the world’s biggest AI clusters — comparable to those that Meta and xAI build for their own massive AI workloads. That brings a lot of power for startups to apply to their own workloads on a pay-as-they-go basis. Currently, companies such as Evidium, Inworld, Suno, and more are leveraging OCI AI infrastructure to deliver the computing power and performance they need to build their next-generation AI solutions. Use of OCI gives these startups a leg up if they want to work with the huge installed base of Oracle Database and Fusion Applications customers. In addition, OCI has startup accelerator programs which provides free credits for startups up to $100K, so startups can get more out of their investment while building cutting-edge new solutions.1
Scalability remains critical. OCI’s Zettascale cluster capability can offer aggregate network throughput of 100 petabytes per second with only microseconds of latency from machine-to-machine. This scale was unheard of in the industry until just a few months ago. By combining this high-powered network with OCI’s advanced storage solutions, startups can train models faster, run workloads more efficiently, and achieve a better total cost of ownership (TCO).
Run Faster, Pay Less
Cost is a big deal for small-but-growing companies, and the architecture you choose should deliver high performance while training and serving generative AI models cost-effectively. AI startups should look for infrastructure that’s optimized to run these workloads faster on a true pay-as-you-go pricing model—like OCI. Unlike others, OCI has the same low price globally, so you don’t have the overhead and complexity of picking from thousands of different compute SKUs. Remember, for startups as well as larger companies, the faster your jobs run, the less you pay.
Furthermore, OCI offers a complete platform that goes beyond just training models. Unlike GPU-only specialists, once you’re ready to launch your product, OCI provides the best value for hosting your model and applications. Or if you want to deploy the industry’s leading LLMs from Hugging Face, Meta, Mistral, and others for your own use you can do this via OCI Data Science with just a few clicks. By combining high-speed performance with a comprehensive suite of tools, OCI is uniquely positioned to help startups succeed in an increasingly competitive market.
Putting Security and Reliability at the Core
Security anchors our platform. Customer A’s data must never be accessible to Customer B—by accident or otherwise. Strong data isolation and clear policies govern how data is managed and used for training AI models, helping ensure trust and compliance. Being able to share a cluster network across multiple jobs run by a startup or a startup’s customers with strong isolation provides higher security, protects sensitive information, and enables startups to innovate with confidence. This foundation matters because the quality of data directly drives the quality of AI outcomes.
By building security and reliability into every layer of the platform Oracle ensures that startups can focus on developing cutting-edge AI solutions, and worry less about data breaches or compliance issues. Startups and enterprises alike trust Oracle’s infrastructure to safeguard their data while supporting their innovation goals.
Innovation Beyond GPUs: The Role of Resiliency, Networking and Distributed Cloud
Startups require an AI platform that minimizes the need to directly manage resources. What they need is a reliable, high-performance platform that gets the fundamentals right including a great network and great storage. Even minor failures in AI infrastructure disrupt workflows and waste valuable resources. OCI mitigates these risks with robust fault-tolerant architecture, which ensures developers can focus on solving critical business challenges instead of troubleshooting interruptions.
Of course, raw compute power is key, but AI workloads depend on more than the fastest GPUs. Networking also plays a critical role, and Oracle introduced innovations that streamline those technologies.
Take RoCE or RDMA over Converged Ethernet networking for example. RDMA has powered Oracle Exadata databases for decades, and we were the first to run multi-tenant workloads on RoCE—even before AI became mainstream. By applying optimized RoCE to enable seamless communication across tens of thousands of GPUs, we can deliver multiple gigaflops of performance per cluster, giving startups the efficiency and scalability needed. We also support InfiniBand networking for use cases such as AI training that require ultra-low latency to offer our customers choices in leading networking technologies. In addition, Oracle works closely with partners and industry leaders, driving standards through initiatives like UEC to deliver the best performance for AI workloads.
For over a decade, cloud providers focused on delivering cloud services in a handful of public cloud regions. OCI changed that equation by making full cloud services available for specific governments, for the EU, and even on-premises. This provides new ways for AI startups to provide their services and for customers to consume them. OCI’s deployment options—which allow companies to run their cloud services securely in a sovereign cloud setting—are attractive to startups targeting markets with strict data location and privacy requirements.
Startups like Fireworks AI are already leveraging these innovations. By using OCI’s high-performance AI solutions with industry-leading RDMA networking, the startup is building a hyper-optimized inferencing engine to help other startups maximize the value of their GPUs—an essential step in deploying AI models efficiently.
Unlocking the Transformative Potential of Cloud AI
Think about the transition from the Yellow Pages to Google Search—a revolution that drastically sped access to information, whether it was finding a restaurant or mapping out the fastest route. Cloud-enabled AI takes this transformation much further. It doesn’t just save time; it effectively shrinks the time it takes to perform complex tasks and creates entirely new possibilities. AI agents can now collaborate with each other to solve complex problems across industries, enabling faster research, deeper insights into behaviors, and improved trend analysis.
This rapid pace of innovation requires robust cloud infrastructure to sustain growth. With OCI, startups have access to the same versatile and cost-effective tools leveraged by the world’s leading enterprises. This enables these businesses to focus on their core vision, without the distractions of managing hardware or worrying about prohibitive costs.
Startups can find out more at the OCI AI Solutions Hub and check out developer sandboxes or packaged deployments of popular software.
1Available to startups nominated by Oracle that meet specific qualification criteria. Not available in the United States. Ends May 31, 2025.
