By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO, June 17 (Reuters) - Oracle ORCL.N said on Tuesday that its cloud computing division is working with Elon Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI to offer the startup's latest AI model to business customers.

Grok 3, as the model is called, first came out February and aimed to rival the latest offerings from DeepSeek and OpenAI. Musk made the model available to paying subscribers of his X social media platform, as well as through xAI itself.

Oracle will now offer Grok 3 from its data centers to corporate users who want to use the model but need their data to remain under their existing security protections with Oracle, Karan Batta, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Reuters on Monday.

Oracle also offers models from Meta, French startup Mistral and Cohere on the service, part of its overall strategy of providing versions of popular models in a way that businesses can integrate into corporate software.

"Our goal here is to make sure that we can provide a portfolio of models - we don't have our own," Batta said. "That's the current strategy. We are going to be the one that offers all of them."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)

((stephen.nellis@thomsonreuters.com))