WekaIO (WEKA), the AI-native data platform company, announced its partnership with NexGen Cloud , a sustainable infrastructure-as-a-service provider in the United Kingdom, to to deliver a high-performance infrastructure foundation for its upcoming AI Supercloud, as well as the on-demand services offered by Hyperstack , NexGen Cloud’s GPUaaS platform.
NexGen Cloud is committed to offering sustainable high-performance computing solutions and has therefore built one of the largest GPU fleets in the world, powered entirely by renewable energy sources. In September 2023, the company announced its plans to create a new $1 billion AI Supercloud aimed at democratizing AI innovation by providing customers with affordable, on-demand access to the most powerful graphics processing units , GPUs).
Rise of the GPU Cloud The explosive growth of generative AI in the past year has led to extremely high demand for powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to power AI model training and inference. Obtaining the necessary GPUs for these performance-intensive workloads is becoming increasingly difficult as demand exceeds supply. The advanced GPUs needed to support AI workloads at scale can be expensive and complex to manage, posing an insurmountable barrier for many companies looking to adopt and expand their enterprise AI initiatives.
At the same time, demand for public cloud resources is exceeding available supply, leaving many companies without a viable solution for AI initiatives. Innovative vendors like NexGen Cloud are now scaling their significant resources to meet the increasing demand for data infrastructure services that can support large-scale AI model training and inference workloads.
According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, limited supply and rising costs of GPUs will be the main reasons why companies explore and adopt GPU cloud infrastructure for their AI projects. “Full-stack as-a-service business models for generative AI will gain popularity,” said John Abbott , Principal Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The ever-increasing costs for AI-based infrastructure are dampening enthusiasm for on-premises deployment and creating a preference for cloud deployment.” 1
Powering the Next Wave of AI Innovation NexGen Cloud‘s AI Supercloud service, powered by NVIDIA’s latest advanced GPU hardware, will provide an affordable, on-demand, compute-intensive solution for enterprises, research organizations and governments that innovating at the intersection between cloud and AI. The company selected the WEKA® Data Platform to deliver the critical software infrastructure needed to improve the performance and efficiency of its new accelerated computing service offering.
“When we started developing our AI Supercloud solution, we looked at various data platforms and parallel file system solutions. The extreme scale and performance requirements of the environment quickly forced other vendors to fall by the wayside,” said Chris Starkey , co-founder Founder and CEO of NexGen Cloud . “WEKA‘s data platform immediately stood out, not only for its exceptional performance and low latency, but also for its ability to maximize the efficiency of our GPU cloud with a hardware-agnostic, innovative software solution. It allowed us to leverage existing to leverage hardware investments and power all our cloud services as efficiently and sustainably as possible, which is central to our mission.”
WEKA’s data platform software provides unparalleled performance and scale to efficiently provision large-scale GPU environments, transforming stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines that seamlessly provision data-hungry GPUs, making them run more efficiently, more sustainably, and up to 20x faster . With WEKA, NexGen Cloud delivers a better customer experience by enabling faster access and processing of massive amounts of data, regardless of file size, so the customer can focus their efforts on the algorithms, rather than on managing the underlying data architecture.
“The WEKA Data Platform provides NexGen Cloud with the extreme speed and scale we need to power our next-generation GPU environment and help all types of enterprise customers run their most demanding AI model training and inference workloads quickly, affordably and sustainably,” said Starkey. “At the same time, WEKA has been an incredible partner. We are confident that they will grow and innovate with us as we continue to expand and develop our Hyperstack and AI Supercloud offerings
“GPU cloud providers like NexGen Cloud will play a critical role in accelerating the next wave of AI innovation,” said Jonathan Martin , President at WEKA. “The WEKA Data Platform helps GPUs efficiently achieve peak performance, reducing energy consumption and providing customers with a much more sustainable way to run enterprise AI workloads – even at extreme scale. We are excited about our partnership with NexGen Cloud to bring their ambitious AI Supercloud to market and help them power the future with democratized access to the most powerful GPUs in the world.”
SOURCE: PRNewsWire