Oracle founder Larry Ellison wants a data center for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in every country. He wants to build hundreds of data centers and claims that this will set Oracle apart from the big three.

Oracle will build hundreds of data centers. So says Founder and CEO Larry Ellison. He wants a data center for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in every country. Ellison claims this is how OCI differentiates itself from Microsoft Azure, AWS, and GCP. According to him, these parties are building several gigantic data centers in a few locations. OCI will have smaller automated sites that need to offer all possible services from OCI.

Ellison spins very briefly again as usual. After all, it’s not as if the big three hyperscalers were limited to a handful of data centers. For example, Microsoft Azure has around 60 data center regions worldwide, ten of which are already operational in the EU and six are under construction, including one in Belgium. Those who live in the EU, the USA or China and Japan are therefore quite well supplied with geographically close data centers.

A difference, but not always

Ellison goes on to claim that other providers’ services aren’t always available everywhere, and that’s true, but not entirely. The rollout of new features is sometimes gradual, but most services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon will eventually be available in all regions. AWS uses a somewhat unique strategy here, based on local zones. These are smaller data centers closer to customers, while not offering the full bandwidth of AWS. The cloud provider mainly uses them for latency-sensitive solutions.

OCI can make a modest difference there in our region, but only for workloads that are extremely latency sensitive. The impact of the strategy is potentially greatest in South America and Africa, where the infrastructure of the main players is actually very limited. Moreover, Ellison’s words at this point are little more than that. OCI has 34 active cloud regions in 22 countries worldwide and is currently on the hunt.

That being said, OCI has momentum today. Oracle Cloud is growing rapidly and offers many solutions that are more than competitive with what the big players in the market have. According to Ellison, this is partly due to the fact that OCI is based on a fundamentally different and more modern architecture. According to him, this allows for safer and cheaper data centers.