Oracle's '300 Mile Per Hour' AI Tailwind
Interview with Scott Charter of Oracle
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From his vantage point advising 15,000 Oracle enterprise customers, Scott Charter sees AI being rapidly integrated into the operating system of modern business. Speaking on the sidelines of the DCD New York event in March, Charter, Director of AI Strategy for North America at Oracle, tells Cool Vector how AI is reshaping everything from hiring and benefits management to quarterly financial closes — and believes the demand curve has no ceiling.
"I remind you: today's AI is the worst AI you'll ever see,” Charter says. “A month from now, two months from now, a year from now, it will be dramatically different. We are only anticipating where our new growth will come from. I look back to my customer base and I use a baseball metaphor — right now, most enterprises are not turning on true inferencing engines inside of their companies. We're not in the top of the first inning of that metaphorical ball game. We're all still looking for parking."
Key takeaways from Scott Charter’s Cool Vector interview:
Oracle has rapidly scaled from traditional cloud infrastructure to AI factories, exemplified by expanding from 131,000 to 800,000 GPUs in a single cluster.
Corporate AI adoption is evolving from author-and-answer tools toward agentic workflows that can compress multi-week business processes into days.
Charter sees compute costs trending toward near-zero, which he expects to unlock an era of abundance where AI applications expand far beyond what cost-justification currently allows.
#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #ai #coolvector #oracle
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Oracle’s ‘300 Mile Per Hour’ AI Tailwind
Scott Charter, Director of AI Strategy, North America, Oracle
Scott Charter: My name is Scott Charter. I’m from Denver, Colorado. I’m the Director of AI Strategy for North America at Oracle.
Scott Charter: My day job is to espouse the view and strategy for Oracle to our 15,000 large enterprise customers that run our Fusion application suite, and how we are embedding our AI magic into our platform. What I then do with our customer base is explain how they too can start turning on some of that functionality.
I go beyond that — I have a background in data centers for 25-plus years. I speak to data centers at night, during the day. I speak about AI strategy for go-to-market.
In 2016, Oracle launched our second-generation cloud in one location to start, which was in Phoenix, Arizona. I came into the company in April of 2018, and at that point we had four locations: Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Frankfurt, and London.
We had a very fast rise of our traditional cloud environments in various cloud regions around the world. And then AI started to really take off, and we went from needing 20-megawatt facilities to gigawatt facilities. It was like going downhill at a good rate of speed and all of a sudden having a 300-mile-an-hour tailwind speed up your vehicle.
We need to continue to support and grow enterprise computing for our traditional applications that we’ve been doing for decades. At the same time, we now have this massive demand for more AI, and that takes a very specialized type of AI factory. Look at what we’re seeing from Elon Musk with xAI and that massive growth.
In addition to our traditional enterprise growth, we now have these AI factories. Oracle in October 2025 announced we went from 131,000 to 800,000 GPUs in a single cluster. That might sound a little techy, but the demand for AI growth requires larger and larger models. Those models have to sit on GPUs — whether they’re from NVIDIA, AMD, or other chip manufacturers — and they all need to be housed in very, very large facilities.
So we have two different strategies: AI factories, and very soon, inference locations where you actually use those models. Those are going to be akin to our cloud regions around the world.
David Snow: How is corporate demand for AI taking shape?
Scott Charter: If we look back three years, we saw this really cool tool that would help us write a paper or write a review for an employee. That took some immediate headache off of managers. We then evolved that to being able to answer anything by using large corporate data that had been tied up in filing cabinets for 40 years — now we have the ability to ask it and come up with answers immediately for customers that had questions.
Where this now evolves to, though, is instead of author and answer, imagine going to action — we’re starting to come up with agentic workflows to speed up how something gets done inside of a company. That demand is going to cross so many different lines of business, whether it’s helping to speed up the hiring of new employees, managing benefits to keep people staying in the company, or maybe helping close our books on a quarterly close — not taking six weeks to get that done, but getting it done in six days.
The demand there is limitless. Then there are industries. What if we can start solving some of the wildest challenges — I call them BHAGs, Big Hairy Audacious Goals of physics. What if we could come up with a better way to build a new wafer? Just recently, Elon Musk announced his goal to do a Terafab — a new way to build even more chips. What if we could put physics behind that and solve it very quickly? Or what if we can go solve all of disease in the next decade? There’s not going to be a problem with demand for new ideas to use these applications. They’re only going to grow.
David Snow: What trend will you be tracking closely in 2026?
Scott Charter: I remind you: today’s AI is the worst AI you’ll ever see. A month from now, two months from now, a year from now, it will be dramatically different. We are only anticipating where our new growth will come from.
I look back to my customer base and I use a baseball metaphor — right now, most enterprises are not turning on true inferencing engines inside of their companies. We’re not in the top of the first inning of that metaphorical ball game. We’re all still looking for parking.
David Snow: What is the most notable challenge in digital infrastructure today?
Scott Charter: We can go from building a facility to managing that facility. From an operational sense, getting more of these facilities up and around the world takes a lot of people from the trades — we need so many more electricians and plumbers and others to help wire it all up. At the same time, we also need engineers, marketers, and people who can put out the message. Marketing, sales, engineering — we need all of this.
We have a silver tsunami happening with all of these experienced people who brought us through the dotcom bubble, and who might now be thinking it’s time to step back and let the younger generation come in. So we need to continue to recruit.
David Snow: What types of inbound calls have you been getting from customers that add up to a recurring theme?
Scott Charter: Every first large C-level call I’m on is: help us figure out how we could really use AI. Some think about how to become more efficient — not that they want to get rid of employees, but what if they could enable their employees to stop doing mundane tasks and work on higher-level items that will make more revenue? They see this as a growth engine, not as a way to cut back on costs.
I speak to our install base and say: by the way, you’re already paying us for this suite of services that we’re delivering. We are your system of record. We help you do all of this already. And guess what — I want to show you how you can turn on these features. They’re already included. The great thing about my role is I’m not selling anything. I’m saying, let me show you what you already own and how to turn it on.
David Snow: What makes you feel bullish about being part of the digital infrastructure market going forward?
Scott Charter: The cost of compute continues to tumble. We are going to a point where intelligence is actually going to be so limitlessly inexpensive that we’ll use it for so many other reasons without having to worry about justifying the cost.
At that point, it just unlocks so much opportunity — to grow our national economy, to grow corporate revenue, or to build a mission if you are a government or a university. There is so much more we can do because we have so many new tools that are going to continue to come online and just be available. I come from an idea of abundance.
David Snow: Why have you gotten involved with the Nomad Futurist Foundation?
Scott Charter: I joined the Nomads about a year and a half ago because I saw a mutual vision to go out and find a new crop of people who never thought there would be an opportunity inside of Oracle or inside of the digital infrastructure industry — coming after underserved populations. These are the folks we’re looking to reach out to and say: there is such a wonderful opportunity here. Come and join us.
