The news
On August 13, 2026, Oracle (ORCL) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud unit of Amazon (AMZN), announced an expanded, long-term agreement to speed customer migration to Oracle AI Database@AWS, as the service reached 22 AWS regions and added a pay-per-use Exadata option.
Oracle AI Database@AWS lets companies run Oracle databases, including on Oracle's Exadata database platform, inside AWS and next to the AWS applications and analytics tools that use the data. Under the new agreement, the two companies pledged to keep investing in the service and to help more customers move onto it and adopt it, according to the announcement, which Oracle and AWS both published. The announcement did not disclose financial terms or the length of the agreement.
The main product change was the general availability of Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure within the service. Exadata is Oracle's high-performance database system. With Exascale, customers choose how much compute and storage they want, and Oracle spreads each database across a shared pool of storage servers, so customers no longer have to reserve their own database and storage machines. Oracle said this makes Exadata's cost model workable for more kinds of workloads, from small databases to deployments across several regions for high availability and disaster recovery. Exascale also adds instant thin cloning, which lets teams create development and test copies of a database that do not require a second full set of storage.
Oracle said the service now runs in 22 AWS regions across Asia Pacific, Europe and the Americas. When it became generally available a year earlier, it ran in two regions, US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon), according to Techzine. Nathan Thomas, Oracle's senior vice president of product management, said the growth shows enterprises want "a simpler, lower-cost path" to modernize Oracle workloads within AWS.
Oracle also listed features added over the past year: Autonomous AI Database Serverless, application-to-database round-trip latency as low as 165 microseconds when using AWS EC2 placement groups, zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (analytics without building data pipelines), Oracle-managed backups to Amazon S3, and connections to Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker.
Named customers include Korean beauty retailer CJ Olive Young, Kobalt Music Group, which runs the dedicated version of the Exadata service in AWS, and Barcelona's Metropolitan Transport Authority. Partners can resell the service through AWS Channel Partner Private Offers, and Oracle said its Oracle Migration Accelerator program helps fund migration services.
The numbers
- AWS regions offering Oracle AI Database@AWS
- 22
- Regions at general availability a year earlier (per Techzine)
- 2
- Lowest application-to-database round-trip latency cited by Oracle
- 165 microseconds
Why CEOs should care
For companies that standardized on AWS but still run core systems on Oracle databases, the choice has often been between re-engineering the database for a new platform or leaving it on premises, away from the rest of the cloud estate. Oracle is pitching a third route: move the database into AWS largely as is. Buyers should ask which of the 22 regions meet their data-residency rules, whether Exascale is offered in each region they need, and how Oracle Migration Accelerator funding is applied to their project.
For CFOs, Exascale changes what you pay for. Instead of running dedicated Exadata servers, customers specify the compute and storage they need and pay per use, which Oracle says makes Exadata practical for smaller databases as well as larger multi-region deployments. Model the full cost, including Oracle licensing and existing AWS spending commitments, and ask both vendors in writing how Oracle AI Database@AWS usage is billed and whether it counts toward those commitments. The announcement does not address either point.
CISOs and boards should treat this as a shared-responsibility question. Oracle says workloads can use Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and Oracle-managed backups to Amazon S3, which means two vendors touch the same critical data. Ask how responsibility for patching, encryption keys and incident response is split between Oracle and AWS before moving regulated workloads, the kind Oracle says financial services and transportation customers are already moving.
The bigger picture
The agreement shows how former cloud rivals now sell through each other. Oracle also offers its database service inside Microsoft (MSFT) Azure and in Google Cloud, owned by Alphabet (GOOGL), according to ERP Today. For AWS, hosting Oracle's database keeps the surrounding applications, analytics and AI spending on its platform; its database services vice president, Ganapathy Krishnamoorthy, framed the benefit as AWS analytics and AI services sitting where customer data lives. For Oracle, the model keeps customers on Oracle databases even as they move everything else to another cloud.
What happened next
On September 10, 2026, Oracle reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 results, with total revenue up 30% to $19.3 billion and cloud infrastructure revenue up 121% to $7.4 billion. Reporting on those results on September 11, ERP Today said Oracle's multicloud database revenue from Azure, AWS and Google Cloud grew 353%. Oracle's earnings release did not break out AWS-specific figures.
Watch which additional regions get Exascale, whether the migration commitment produces named large-customer moves, and whether Oracle reports multicloud database growth again in its second-quarter fiscal 2027 results.
