Oracle Vectorizes Its Customers Data

Comment If you're an Oracle customer – throw a pebble into a crowd of 100 CIOs and you're bound to hit one – then Big Red has vectorized you. Or, more accurately, it has vectorized your data, according to Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO, who lobbed about the terminology in this week's conference keynote as if it conferred some sort of mystical technological incantation.

"The Oracle database can vectorize anything that's in an Oracle database, a different database, a different cloud, and make that data easily accessible to the AI model for reasoning," Ellison said during his keynote at Oracle AI World, its annual Las Vegas shindig.

"The first thing that Oracle did [was take] private data and [make] it accessible to AI models. We took all of our customer data and we vectorized it."

Whether customers fancied being vectorized is apparently immaterial. When Oracle wants to do something, it does it. Progress waits for no one's consent.

So why the vectorization obsession? Ellison explained to his audience of customers and channel partners that Big Red wanted to ask its "reasoning models" what products customers are likely to buy in the next six months.

Armed with these predictions, Oracle sales teams are then able to fire off emails to prospective buyers complete with the three best customer references to nudge them toward a particular product.

"That request required the generation of a computer program called an AI agent that had to figure out you were going to buy this product," Ellison said.

"We started with customer data because we think there is nothing more important to us than our customers. Now some people who are cynical, you would say there is nothing more valuable to us than our customers, but they go hand in hand."

No, Larry, not nearly cynical enough. A real cynic might be able to imagine what Oracle could do with all that customer data once it is mangled through a massive predictive machine. Might Oracle want to figure out how to maximize revenue and margin from each customer? Might it want to identify which customers would cough up more license fees after a friendly software audit? The possibilities are endless.

But this is the AI boom, and cynics need to step aside. The industry plans to spend an estimated $500 billion a year building datacenters to provide the scale needed to train and serve up more AI. Everyone needs to get on board.

How will anyone actually pay for all this? Good question. OpenAI has apparently promised Oracle $300 billion to build out the datacenters it needs, which might surprise those funding the LLM startup that has so far raised something like $60-70 billion in funding – depending on whose numbers you believe – and currently runs at a loss.

Minor details like financial reality don't trouble Ellison, though. Oracle is engaged in AI datacenter building plans costing hundreds of billions of dollars and will rely on some borrowing itself.

Quizzed in a pre-conference interview over whether OpenAI has the money to pay Oracle back, newly appointed co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said: "Of course."

Oracle's confidence shines through in the audacious scale of its datacenter construction plans. Ellison told conference attendees that the new facility in Abilene, Texas, would eventually run half a million Nvidia GPUs and consume 1.2 GW of power, "provided by a combination of grid power and on-site natural gas turbines." Eight separate buildings spanning 1,000 acres will be connected "to support a single workload," he said.

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Inhabitants of Earth might reasonably worry about the impact of such electricity consumption on the planet. But not Ellison, who literally owns the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

His answer is that AI is here to save us from climate change. And make food plentiful. Proudly displaying a very big greenhouse on screen during his keynote, he revealed that the Ellison Institute of Technology is involved in a company called Wild Bio, which has developed an AI platform for synthetic biology.

The goal is to develop crops that can extract CO₂ from the atmosphere and convert it into calcium carbonate through biomineralization, simultaneously increasing food yields while reducing carbon dioxide.

"This is what I mean by AI," Ellison said.

All perfectly feasible, but it had better be quick. UN data shows levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased by a record amount in 2024 worsening climate change, while natural "sinks" for carbon are weakening.

Fear not, though. If all the doublethink makes your brain explode, Oracle has the solution for that too. Emblazoned with Oracle's unmistakable red livery, an ambulance appeared on the screen behind Ellison, who waxed lyrical about the health benefits of the connected, AI-powered vehicle.

"We're actually building these prototypes. Will we mass-produce an ambulance? I have no idea. If you told me a couple of years ago we'd be building power plants – a billion-watt power plant – I would have said you need to get more rest," Ellison said.

Shuffling out of the auditorium, conference attendees might wish for a rest, but not before they have been vectorized – if Oracle has its way. ®