Why $800-billion Oracle wants to build AI-powered ambulances?

Oracle cofounder and CTO Larry Ellison at the company's flagship even AI World.

American tech giant Oracle has gone from building databases to becoming a hyperscaler and infra powerhouse, and now, cofounder Larry Ellison wants to take that infrastructure on the road, literally.

The Texas-headquartered company is building AI-powered ambulances, as part of its broader push to create a fully connected healthcare ecosystem.

“Believe it or not, we’re building these prototypes,” Ellison said in his keynote address at the company’s flagship AI World 2025 event last week. “Will we mass-produce an ambulance? I have no idea but the ambulance is connected and it’s loaded with AI, it’s a much safer way to transport patients.”

Of his nearly 100-minute address, roughly two-thirds was devoted to healthcare-related artificial intelligence, a clear signal of where Oracle plans to concentrate in the near and medium term.

The ambulance ambition may sound a move far from Oracle’s software roots but the company is building what Ellison described as a “fully connected medical ecosystem,” — linking homes, hospitals, clinics, and now ambulances through AI and data platforms.

Why is Oracle building ambulances?

The idea is to capitalise on Oracle’s healthcare beyond hospital walls.

The company is developing internet-connected medical devices that stream patient data into databases.

“If your blood pressure drops below a certain threshold, your doctor is immediately notified,” he said. “Between your home and the emergency room (ER), the ER doctors are talking to the EMTs (emergency medical technician) in the ambulance.”

Also read: Oracle to deploy 50,000 AMD GPUs by 2026 as competition heats up with Nvidia

What’s AI in ambulances?

At the foundation is Oracle’s AI database and AI Data Platform, which allow real-time reasoning on private medical data.

The company recently announced that major information technology (IT) companies such as Infosys, Cognizant, and Accenture, among others, have committed over $1.5 billion in training, development, and industry use cases to support Oracle’s newly launched AI Data Platform.

Also read: Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, LTIMindtree invest in Oracle’s $1.5 bn AI Data Platform

“We can take all of your data, from hospital records, vital signs, test results, and make it available securely to AI models that reason with it,” Ellison said.

Oracle is also rebuilding Cerner’s hospital management software, which it acquired in 2022, using generative AI tools. “We can rebuild the entire Cerner code base and modernise it in three years,” Ellison said.

Predicting pandemics?

Ellison recalled his MRI experience, where most data went unused. “You’re looking for one or two things, and the rest of the stuff you ignore. AI will find it,” he added.

Oracle is also developing meta-genomic testing devices that can identify any pathogen from a single blood sample.

“They’ll serve as an early warning system for pandemics,” Ellison added, claiming such tools could have detected COVID-19 much earlier.

How safe is AI in healthcare?

Oracle’s ambulance pivot, however, comes with both ambition and strain. The company recently spent $402 million, nearly 3 percent of its revenue in the latest quarterly earnings, on restructuring.

A major electronic health record (EHR) outage recently at several community health systems (CHS) hospitals in the US exposed the fragility of digital healthcare infrastructure.

The outage, caused by what reports described as a configuration error by Oracle engineers, left 45 hospitals offline for five days.

Agentic AI in healthcare

While Ellison spoke about AI agents that help doctors determine “the best possible care at the highest reimbursement level achievable”, Kaushal Kurapati, head of aI agents platform, Oracle Applications Development said Oracle is embedding such agents across its enterprise suite.

“We are an end-to-end provider, from the database that holds sensitive data like health or financial records, to the AI models that can act on it,” he said.

Unlike rivals, Oracle’s stack lets customers run agents on their data inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without paying per-message model fees, Kurapati said.

It remains to be seen if Oracle will ever manufacture ambulances. “AI will make things so much better for all of us, we’re going to live much better, healthier, and longer lives,” Ellison said.

(This reporter was in Las Vegas on the invitation of Oracle)