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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

Who are Oracle's cloud computing customers? In my circle I hear mostly about AWS, with a little Azure and GCP, but I don't know people running anything on Oracle Cloud. Presumably there are circles where Oracle Cloud is gaining rapidly, given these numbers. Are these Oracle customers shifting from other cloud providers or using cloud resources for the first time?

EDIT: I missed the news from yesterday that OpenAI signed a $300 billion (!) contract with Oracle Cloud:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/openai-and-oracle-reported...

So this big cloud revenue jump may be from a single giant customer.

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Oracle Cloud's strategy early on was to go after huge customers who they thought would like to use the cloud, but otherwise couldn't use AWS for technical reasons. They were the first to do bare metal hosts (no hypervisor) and Layer 2 networking, for example (layer 2 networking not necessarily being anything amazing, but they recognized that lots of potential corporate customers had built their own infrastructure that relied on it, so it was a big barrier to cloud adoption). They also will bend over backwards to gain the customers with deep pockets like big banks, auto manufacturers, etc. This is how they ended up with TikTok. And part of this is that they are very aggressive about building regions, because some of the big customers have hard requirements about where physically their data resides (think small governments that need/want their data on their own soil). I don't know where they stand now from a technical competition perspective (those examples I gave are no longer exotic in 2025), but I suspect they have continued this "court the huge customers" strategy.

Cloud providers are chosen from the top sometimes.

if you’re using Azure, your CFO probably made the decision.

if you’re using AWS, your CEO likely made the decision.

if you’re using Google cloud, likely your CTO made the decision.

If your company relies on government contracts; they dictate the cloud provider; and Oracle knows this.

Why the Google Cloud / CTO association?

I’m not at that level in my career, but I have had very negative issues with Google, their product graveyard, and their lacking of human support for serious issues for paid offerings.

I would not put my business in their hands, ever.

> their lacking of human support for serious issues for paid offerings.

Turns out this problem disappears if you spend enough money.

GCP does a _lot_ of things as well or better than AWS. I particularly mostly like their IAM model (the entire stack including their nice managed identity implementation and use of public key cryptography instead of API keys) and how "projects" (cloud accounts) can inherit properties in a hierarchy.

They have a very long deprecation policy for anything under the actual “Cloud” banner.

Their solutions are more technically sound, their API and UX significantly more consistent; they make the billing system available through the same interfaces that you use for other data processing on the platform.

I wrote a more detailed diatribe on the failings of other providers[0]; but largely the “correctness”, “consistency” are the main reasons. For example their IAM actually works for everything, including GKE pods; and they don’t oversubscribe and try to align VMs to NUMA zones (AWS didn’t do that when I last checked, Azure still doesn’t even try).

Also, as a previous customer; I got much better support from Google than I ever got from AWS; but this is a very variable thing depending on your size, where you are and who your TAM is. In the games industry in Sweden its seriously 10/10- I even talked to the hypervisor, storage and SDN/Network teams directly.

[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/gcp-the-only-good-cloud/

The only aspects that Azure doesn’t have is the NUMA alignment and good support. Azure also has consistent RBAC model that integrates with Kubernetes, PaaS, and extends out to desktop apps like Office and Visual Studio. Unlike AWS, Azure also has a very consistent UI with a single pane of glass and a single API (ARM).

You forgot Hetzner :(

As I said in another comment; unfortunately the C-levels think that marketing is safety.

They’re not choosing Hetzner because they think its the unsafe option.

Some small startup called OpenAI signed a $300m deal with them.

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