https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/news/366626223/Oracle-adds-xAI-Grok-models-to-OCI
Oracle has revealed it will now offer xAI's Grok models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI services.
The tech giant revealed Tuesday that the models will be targeted for specific use cases, including content creation, research and business process automation.
In return, xAI, owned by Elon Musk, will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to train and run inferencing for its next generation of Grok models.
Oracle's addition of xAI models comes as the generative AI (GenAI) market has evolved to a point where cloud providers add models constantly to their platforms. Besides xAI's Grok models, Oracle also offers the Meta Llama family of models, Cohere Command R and Cohere Command, and Mistral open source models. Oracle is a major investor in Cohere.
"There is a convergence of leading AI innovators on OCI," said Federico Torreti, senior director at Oracle.
"We're very much anchored around partnering with leading AI innovators to help provide the right solution for customers," Torreti said.
Oracle's primary goal is to meet its customers' needs, said Matt Kimball, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
"Every indication I get from my conversations with their leadership is that this is more focused on customers and less on competitors," Kimball said.
He added that the Grok models are strong in specific domains, such as healthcare, finance, legal and research, which are the same domains where Oracle is also strong.
With this customer-centric strategy, Oracle is trying to deliver a range of AI services that its customers can easily consume.
"There's a fine line between delivering choice and chaos," Kimball said. "Offer too much choice, and you are perceived as confusing. OCI seems to be striking that balance nicely."
He added that with the customer-centric approach, Oracle also brings OCI level with Azure in terms of offering Grok among its GenAI model choices. Last month, Microsoft revealed that Grok will join Azure AI Foundry, a platform for developers, startups and enterprises to explore new research and innovations at Microsoft.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, said the move is also evidence of OCI's advantageous design, even though it was originally designed for database workloads.
"It turns out the design point of connect data with CPUs, with super-fast and configurable networking, is the same for AI where you move data to the GPUs," Mueller said.
However, David Nicholson, an analyst at Futurum Group, said that Oracle tends to be behind competitors as a cloud provider.
He added that while adding xAI models is "good press," it is still to be determined whether the vendor can provide what it said it could by including xAI Grok 3 models.
"Whenever Oracle announces something like this, there's a lot of work that needs to be done on the back end to make it real, to drive real value," he said. "It's too early to know if this will bear fruit."
He added that including xAI also speaks to the pressure many vendors face to be successful in the AI market.
Kimball said Oracle's inclusion of xAI models on the OCI platform is beneficial to users, especially because Oracle has a large amount of historical and business data on its platform.
"Bringing xAI to all of this data delivers real value to its customers, but also brings all of its customers to xAI," he said. "Customers are looking to bring intelligence to all of this data."
Meanwhile, Oracle's competitor Google introduced updates to its Gemini 2.5 model family. Gemini 2.5 Pro is now generally available, along with Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is now available in preview. The model is an upgrade from the 1.5 and 2.0 Flash models. It is a reasoning model that allows users to control the thinking budget (how many tokens a model can use to think) with an API parameter.
Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.
Informa TechTarget senior news writer Shane Snider contributed to this story.
17 Jun 2025