Microsoft Reportedly Phasing Out Agreement to Lease AI Compute from Oracle

November 7: Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Microsoft is gradually terminating its agreement to lease AI computing resources from Oracle, shutting down the related compute capacity in recent months after declining to renew the contracts, because the Oracle hardware in question uses older-generation Nvidia chips and no longer meets Microsoft's specifications. The move is part of Microsoft's broad reassessment of its multibillion-dollar cloud partnerships; Microsoft had previously spent more than $80 billion to lease compute from cloud companies such as CoreWeave, Nscale and Nebius. An Oracle spokesperson responded that market demand for its AI infrastructure, including earlier GPUs, remains strong; Microsoft declined to comment.