By Hillary Remy, Robert Davey
Publication Date: 2026-11-09 03:47:00
For about three years, Oracle servers helped power the AI version of Microsoft’s Bing. Now, Microsoft is letting the arrangement lapse and has recently been switching off the rented capacity.
It was one of the more unusual partnerships of the early AI rush.
The timing could hardly be worse for Oracle. The news landed a day after the Nasdaq dropped more than 5% and slipped into a correction on Nov. 5, as investors bailed out of AI names on fears of slower data center construction. A customer walking away from old hardware is exactly the kind of story bears have been waiting for.
Why Microsoft walked away from the Bing deal
The deal itself goes back to 2023, when Oracle announced a multi-year agreement for Microsoft to use its cloud AI infrastructure for the AI-assisted Bing, Bloomberg reported. Financial terms were never disclosed. At the time, it looked like a rare case of a cloud giant (Microsoft) renting from a direct rival…
