Uber is set to use custom Ampere Computing chips on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Announced at Oracle CloudWorld 2024, Uber is partnering with Ampere and Oracle to have more control over how its workloads are running on OCI. The partnership enables Uber to co-design its chips with the US fabless semiconductor firm.
“At Uber, we very much like to go deep into the tech,” said Kamran Zargahi, Uber’s Senior Director of Technology Strategy. “We just didn’t use the cloud as a tool and just stay there comfortably. We really wanted to be able to understand the regional and the zonal shapes, the price performance, and all the specifics of the bits and bytes.”
According to Zargahi, Uber drivers and couriers complete more than 30 million trips daily, and the computing infrastructure is used for things like route optimization. “Every second, 15 million AI models get executed,” Zargahi said.
According to Ampere Chief Product Officer Jeff Wittich, Uber’s move to Ampere on OCI has reduced the company’s infrastructure costs as well as power consumption by 30%.
He added that Ampere and Uber are working hand-in-hand on the chip design. “As we look forward to the future, the common team has been working closely on, what are those future optimisations we can make to further tune the microarchitecture of the CPU, even down to that level, to make sure that all of our future generations of CPUs are also incredibly well suited for Uber.”
According to a release from Oracle, Uber selected the cloud provider in 2023 and has been migrating thousands of microservices, multiple data storage platforms, and dozens of AI models to OCI.
Uber uses OCI Compute with AMD for its trip-serving requests, and has moved a “considerable portion of its stateless workloads” to OCI Computer with Ampere Arm.
“Uber is a prime example of a forward-thinking organisation that embraces multi-cloud partnerships to deliver valuable services to its customers,” said Karan Batta, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “We look forward to evolving our cloud partnership with Uber as they continue their rapid growth.”
Founded in 2017 by CEO Renée James and a group of her former Intel colleagues, Ampere designs chips specifically for servers based on Arm architecture, which has grown in popularity among data centre operators in recent years. Ampere has been providing chips to Oracle since 2021 and claims that 95 percent of Oracle’s services are using its infrastructure at present. Earlier this month, reports emerged that Ampere was exploring a sale.
Uber notably previously housed more than 95 percent of its IT in its own data centres. The company signed major seven-year cloud contracts with Google and Oracle in February 2023 in an effort to shift almost “everything” to the cloud.
