I had the cool experience of attending the Oracle AI World Tour along with Marta Tolosa. Thanks a lot for the hosting! The event brought together Oracle's top leadership, industry partners, and customers to showcase how AI is transforming enterprise technology.
Opening Keynote: Mike Sicilia, CEO of Oracle
The event kicked off with a keynote from Mike Sicilia, CEO of Oracle. Having the opportunity to hear directly from Oracle's CEO about the company's vision for AI-powered enterprise solutions was very interesting. Having Mike in Madrid shows how much they care about their customers and partners. Mike shared how Oracle is positioning itself at the forefront of the AI revolution, emphasizing that to unlock AI, you need both technology and data. One of the most important things that was told over and over was how they want you to decide how and where to do it. They give you the tools, the plumbing, it is for you now to take action. By where I mean even in other hyperscalers.
Executive Leadership Panel
One of the highlights was an impressive panel featuring Oracle's senior leadership:
- Mike Sicilia, CEO, Oracle
- Binoy Sukumaran, SVP, Database Cloud, Oracle
- Jason Rees, SVP, Technology and Cloud Infrastructure, EMEA, Oracle
- Glenn Beeswanger, SVP, Applications Labs and SaaS Engineering, Oracle
- Rich Clayton, VP, Product Strategy, AI and Analytics, Oracle
This level of executive presence demonstrated Oracle's commitment to the European market and the AI World Tour initiative.
They touched very interesting topics on how they are supporting their users and how agnostic they are becoming. They want their users to decide where to host and how to do it with full Oracle capabilities.
One of the messages that resonated most for me was from Binoy, how they are running agents at the DB, which makes it ultra fast and secured.
Customer Success Story: Mar Donate, Grupo Bimbo Espana
Mar Donate, General Manager of Grupo Bimbo Espana, joined Mike Sicilia on stage to share how one of the world's largest bakery companies is leveraging Oracle Cloud for their digital transformation journey.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Built for AI
The OCI presentations showcased Oracle's cloud infrastructure advantages:
Key Differentiators:
- Highest performance
- Lowest cost
- Highly secure infrastructure
- Bare metal with off-box virtualization and root of trust
- RoCE v2 with RDMA for Exadata, Compute/HPC, and GPU workloads
Global Footprint:
- 200+ live and planned regions worldwide
- Single pricing across all regions
- Performance SLAs
- Other clouds have >1000x more price points than OCI
Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud
Launched in 2023. First hyperscale sovereign public cloud dedicated to the European Union.
- Independent from other Oracle Cloud regions
- Regions in Germany and Spain
- Managed by teams in 6 EU countries
- Dedicated governance committee
- Same value, pricing, and customer experience
- Access to full suite of 200+ OCI services
Major Announcements
1. OCI Acceleron
Oracle announced Acceleron - featuring fabric accelerators, fabric architectures, and host accelerators to supercharge cloud workloads. Also mentioned Apache Iceberg support.
2. Dedicated Region 25
Announcing General Availability of Dedicated Region 25 - start with just 3 racks and bring the full power of OCI to your own data center.
3. OCI Zettascale10 SuperCluster
The largest AI supercomputer in the cloud:
- 800,000+ GPUs in one OCI Supercluster
- Up to 16 ZFLOPS
- 1.5 GW power
- Oracle Acceleron: 131 PF/s FE, 2.1 EF/s RDMA, <10μs latency
4. OCI Compute with A4 Standard (Ampere)
New A4 Standard instances featuring:
- Bare Metal and Flex VMs
- 96 core AmpereOne M (48 OCPUs)
- 768 GB DDR5 memory
- 100 Gbps network
5. Oracle Dynamic Resource VM
A new memory wastage solution - OCI dynamically adjusts resource accessibility in real-time for CPU and Memory, delivering cost savings.
6. Confidential Computing
Securing data in use with confidential computing on NVIDIA B200 GPUs - enabling Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) for AI inference privacy and regulatory compliance.
AI Platform Capabilities
Access to World's Leading AI Models
Frontier models at your fingertips including:
- xAI: Grok 4, Grok 4 Fast, Grok Code Fast 1, Grok 3, Grok 3 Mini
- OpenAI: O Series, Embedding Models
- Meta: Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 4 Scout, Llama 3.2 11B, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.2 90B, Llama 3.1 405B
- Cohere: Embed 3, Rerank 3.5, Command A, Command R, Command R+
- Google: Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Flash-lite
AI Database (26ai)
Featuring:
- Autonomous Database Catalog
- Real Application Security
- AI Vector Search
GenAI Agent Platform
- Managed, pre-built agents: RAG Agent, SQL Agent, Code Agent
- Open source framework compatibility: LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, AG, CrewAI
MySQL HeatWave
Transactions, Analytics, and GenAI on the world's most popular open-source database - now introducing MySQL AI with accelerating performance for Analytics, Lakehouse, and AutoML/GenAI.
Multicloud Strategy: Oracle is Everywhere
Oracle highlighted its multicloud approach - "Oracle is in the other clouds":
- Oracle AI Database
- Exadata Database Service
- Autonomous AI Database
- Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service
- Autonomous AI Lakehouse
- GoldenGate
Available on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS.
OCI Multicloud Global Footprint Growth:
- 2024: 17 locations
- 2025: 50 locations (+33)
- Planned: 72 locations (+22)
Technical Deep Dive and Customer Case Study from Skydance Animation: Borja Gomez & Javier Negro Dieste
A fantastic technical session featuring including announcements mentioned previously, the coolest one the Zettascale10 SuperCluster!
- Borja Gomez, Field CTO, Oracle EMEA
- Javier Negro Dieste, Supervisor, IT Infrastructure, Skydance Animation
Customer Case Study: Skydance Animation
Skydance Animation shared their cloud journey, showcasing how they use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for their animation production pipeline:
Their History:
- 2010: Features
- 2013: Television
- 2016: Interactive
- 2017: Animation
- 2019: New Media
- 2020: Animation Madrid
- 2021: Animation East, Skydance Canada, Sports
Cloud Studio Architecture:
- Networking with FastConnect to their Madrid data center
- Renderfarm running thousands of cores for movie production
- GPU Workstations for artists
- Storage with high performance, low latency across multiple regions
- Technologies: GitLab, Ansible, Terraform, Packer, Oracle Cloud, Qumulo, HP Anywhere, Softdrive
Key Benefits:
- Any artist, any movie, from anywhere
- 100% of farm, servers, and storage migrated to cloud in 2025
- Geo-distributed storage testing in production
- Greater flexibility for GPU workstations
- Migration from traditional on-premise to Oracle Kubernetes Engine
Hands-On Experience: Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure
At the demo area, I got to see the Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure - a rugged, portable cloud solution that brings OCI capabilities to the edge. Dulce Nieto demoed this one to us. This hardware showcases Oracle's commitment to meeting customers wherever their data needs to be. I really liked the device, If I could have one for my homelab...
Key Takeaways
AI is Oracle's Priority: From infrastructure to database to applications, AI is woven into every Oracle offering
Multicloud is Reality: Oracle's strategy of being present in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud removes barriers for enterprises
Scale Matters: The Zettascale10 SuperCluster with 800,000+ GPUs shows Oracle is serious about AI infrastructure
Customer Success: Real stories from Grupo Bimbo and Skydance Animation demonstrate practical cloud adoption
Executive Commitment: Having Mike Sicilia and multiple SVPs present shows Oracle's dedication to the AI World Tour
Final Thoughts
Oracle AI World Tour 2026 was an energizing event that showcased the future of enterprise AI. The combination of major product announcements, executive insights, customer stories, and hands-on demos made for a pretty cool experience.
If you have the opportunity to attend an Oracle AI World Tour stop, I highly recommend it!
