As Larry Ellison settled in for dinner at the elegant Japanese restaurant Nobu in Palo Alto last year, he was joined by his longtime friend Elon Musk. The pair had dined there together several times, but on this occasion they sat across from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. The two billionaires shared an objective: get their hands on more of the Nvidia chips, known as GPUs, fuelling the generative AI revolution.

“I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs: ‘Please take our money. No, no, take more of it,’” Ellison, co-founder of software company Oracle, later told an audience of financial analysts. “By the way, I got dinner?.?.?.?It went OK. It worked.”

The high-stakes networking speaks volumes about how Ellison, at the age 81, has clawed his way back to the top of the tech heap. A close friend and ally of Apple’s Steve Jobs during a previous tech era, he is now forging new personal alliances and navigating the industry’s often intense rivalries on the way to staking out a place in the vanguard of the AI revolution.