Oracle Retires OCPU Billing for Autonomous Database Dedicated and Cloud@Customer: Transition to ECPU Begins May 28, 2025

Oracle is officially sunsetting the OCPU (Oracle CPU) billing metric for Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure and Cloud@Customer, marking a pivotal shift toward a more flexible and scalable billing model—ECPU (Elastic CPU).

If you're using Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing in these environments, this change will directly impact how you provision, bill, and access new features going forward.

What’s Changing?

Key Date: May 28, 2025

• OCPU billing metric will be retired.

• New Autonomous VM Clusters (AVMs) can only be provisioned using ECPU.

• The OCI Console and APIs will reject OCPU-based provisioning requests.

• Existing AVMs using OCPU will continue to run, but some features will be unavailable.

What Is ECPU and Why Is It Better?

Introduced in January 2024, ECPU offers a more elastic, consumption-based model for compute usage across workloads. Unlike OCPU, ECPU supports granular scaling, burstable workloads, and newer platform capabilities.

⚠️ Important: You can convert your OCPU-based AVMs and ADBs to ECPU without downtime by submitting a Service Request (SR).

Real-World Example: What It Means for You

Scenario:

A financial services company has multiple AVMs running under OCPU billing. Starting in May 2025, they want to enable Autonomous Database for Developers and use Oracle Database 23ai features.

Problem: These features are only supported under ECPU billing.

Solution:

• Submit a Service Request to convert OCPU AVMs to ECPU.

• No downtime.

• Unlocks future-facing capabilities and removes dependency on deprecated SKUs.

What You Need To Do

Before May 28, 2025:

• Provision any new Autonomous VM Clusters using the ECPU billing metric.

• Avoid automating new OCPU-based cluster creation—it will fail after the cutoff date.

• Review your existing OCPU clusters and decide if you want to convert early.

After May 28, 2025:

• You can’t create new OCPU-based clusters.

• Oracle may automatically convert existing OCPU clusters to ECPU at a future date.

Which SKUs Are Changing?

Here’s a quick SKU transition guide:

Workload	OCPU SKU (Retired)	ECPU SKU (New)
ADW Dedicated	B92182	B95712
ATP Dedicated	B92181	B95713
ADW Dedicated BYOL	B92184	B95714
ATP Dedicated BYOL	B92183	B95715
Cloud@Customer ADW	B92419	B95708
Cloud@Customer ATP	B92418	B95709

(Full list available in Oracle Doc ID 2998755.1)

❓ Still Have Questions?

Reach out to:

• Your Oracle Account Team

• The Autonomous Database customer forum

• Or raise a Service Request on My Oracle Support

Final Thoughts

This shift marks a big leap forward for Oracle Autonomous Database customers—enabling a cloud-native, flexible billing model that supports innovation while optimizing cost and performance.

Whether you’re modernizing your database infrastructure, adopting 23ai, or scaling dev environments, ECPU is the future.

👉 Start preparing today to ensure a seamless transition.