Oracle has said it might consider letting customers bring their own hardware to Oracle data centers.

During last week’s earnings call, co-CEO Clay Magouryk explained how different business models impact Oracle’s cash flow for new data center deployments.

Magouryk said: “In some cases, customers actually want to bring their own hardware, in which case, we don’t have any capital expense. It’s really around the data center itself, possibly networking gear, as well as a human labor cost.”

He added that there are other “models” where vendors want to rent the capacity, in which case “those rent payments start when that is provisioned for the customer.”

“We’re then taking that cash flow and pushing that out to all of the different suppliers. And then, obviously, you got the model where Oracle takes its own cash, pays up front for the hardware, and then puts the capacity in. That’s obviously the most cash-intensive upfront.”

As reported by The Information, these models also include the possibility for chip providers themselves to lease back hardware that ends up in Oracle’s data centers.

The concept of chip providers leasing access to their own product has not been discussed previously by Oracle, but has been seen more often in recent months, particularly with the neoclouds. Nvidia, for example, signed an agreement earlier this year to lease some $6.3bn in unsold compute capacity back from CoreWeave, and has also signed a similar deal with Lambda worth $1.5bn. Nvidia has its own cloud service, known as Lepton, through which it makes GPU capacity available.

During the earnings call, Magouryk also noted that the company is seeing a lot of changing requests from customers regarding AI provisioning.

“We have lots of customers that might sign up for a few thousand of one type of GPU, and then they’ll come back and say, ‘Well, actually, I’d like to get even more capacity somewhere else. Will you take this back?’ And we do that all day, every day. And we’re constantly moving customers around and adding aggregate net capacity,” he said, adding that spinning up capacity for large model providers typically takes around two to three days.

Oracle Database@Google Cloud adds regions

In other Oracle news, the company has added new regions to its Database@Google Cloud offering.

The offering sees Oracle hardware deployed in partner cloud providers’ data centers, giving customers easy access to Oracle database services within the alternative cloud.

Newly added regions include India (Asia-South 1, Mumbai) and Canada (North America-Northeast 1, Montreal, and North America-Northeast 2, Toronto).

“As enterprises in India increasingly adopt multicloud strategies, Oracle Database@Google Cloud provides the flexibility, performance, scale, and security they need,” said Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India. “Customers in India can now integrate Oracle AI Database capabilities with Google Cloud’s AI and analytics tools and services to build new AI applications and innovate with speed and confidence.”

Farsad Nasseri, country managing director of Google Cloud Canada, added regarding the Canadian launch: “By combining Oracle’s database leadership with Google Cloud’s AI capabilities, Oracle Database@Google Cloud empowers organizations across Canada to accelerate IT modernization, realize AI’s value, and innovate confidently in a multicloud environment. This launch enables customers to advance their cloud strategies and create next-generation multicloud solutions.”

The solution is now available in 12 locations. Other regions include Asia-Northeast 1 (Tokyo), Australia-Southeast 1 (Sydney), Australia-Southeast 2 (Melbourne), Germany Central (Frankfurt), North America-Northeast 1 (Montreal), South America-East 1 (São Paulo), UK South (London), US Central 1 (Iowa), US East (Ashburn), and US West (Salt Lake City).

New regional availability is planned for the next 12 months to support growing customer demand in Asia-Northeast (Seoul), Asia-Northeast 2 (Osaka), Asia-South 2 (Delhi), Europe Southwest (Madrid), Europe West (Paris), Europe-West 8 (Milan), Europe-West 12 (Turin), Middle East Central (Dammam), North America-South 1 (Mexico), and South America West (Santiago).