On Tuesday, Oracle Corp and Nvidia Corp announced an expansion of their partnership and the addition of tens of thousands of Nvidia chips to boost artificial intelligence-related computational work in Oracle’s cloud.

The expanded partnership comes as more companies use AI and AI models become more complex, necessitating increased investments in data center infrastructure.

While the companies did not disclose the cost of the additional hardware or the number of chips sold, they did state that the expansion includes Nvidia’s A100 and its most advanced H100 GPUs (graphics processing units).

These two chips were also placed on China’s export control list over a month ago. Nvidia stated at the time that it had factored $400 million in potential sales to China into its third-quarter earnings forecast.

According to a note issued on Monday by brokerage Jefferies, Nvidia’s market share of so-called accelerator chips inside the infrastructure of the world’s six largest clouds reached 85% in August. GPUs are chips that help accelerate computing speed and are widely used in AI work, where Nvidia dominates.

While there are many AI chip startups competing with Nvidia, Clay Magouyrk, director of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, believes the newcomers will struggle.

“If you look at the pace at which Nvidia is innovating every 12 to 18 months, they come out with a platform that’s 10 to 50 times better. I believe that for someone to be able to attack that dominance, Nvidia is going to have to stumble,” he said.

Nvidia’s enterprise computing director, Manuvir Das, stated that the Oracle partnership includes increased collaboration to make the AI software run more efficiently on Oracle Cloud and to provide more support to Oracle’s customers.

(Adapted from Nasdaq.com)