WekaIO (WEKA), the AI-native data platform company, announced today that it is partnering with NexGen Cloud, a sustainable infrastructure-as-a-service provider based in the UK, to provide the high-performance infrastructure foundation underpinning its forthcoming AI Supercloud, as well as the on-demand services offered by Hyperstack, NexGen Cloud’s GPUaaS platform.
With a commitment to providing sustainable high-performance computing solutions, NexGen Cloud has built one of the largest fleets of GPUs in the world, powered entirely by renewable energy sources. In September 2023, the company announced plans to create a new $1 billion AI Supercloud with a mission to democratize AI innovation by providing customers with affordable, on-demand access to the world’s most powerful graphics processing units (GPUs).
Rise of the GPU Cloud
The explosion of generative AI in the past year is driving extremely high demand for the powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to fuel AI model training and inference. Obtaining the necessary GPUs these performance-intensive workloads require is becoming increasingly challenging as demand outpaces supply. The advanced GPUs needed to support AI workloads at scale can be expensive and complex to manage, creating an insurmountable barrier for many enterprise organizations looking to adopt and advance their enterprise AI initiatives.
At the same time, demand for public cloud resources is exceeding available resources, leaving many companies without a viable solution for AI initiatives. Innovative vendors like NexGen Cloud are now scaling their considerable resources to support the surge in demand for data infrastructure services that can support large-scale AI model training and inference workloads.
According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, the limited supply and rising cost of GPUs will be key drivers for enterprises to explore and adopt GPU cloud infrastructure for their AI projects. “Full-stack as-a-service business models for generative AI will gain traction,” said John Abbott, Principal Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The ever-rising price of AI-enabled infrastructure is dampening enthusiasm for on-premises deployments, favoring the cloud.”1
Powering the Next Wave of AI Innovation
Built on the latest state-of-the-art GPU hardware from NVIDIA, NexGen Cloud’s AI Supercloud service will provide an affordable, on-demand, compute-intensive solution for enterprises, research organizations, and governments innovating at the intersection of cloud and AI. The company selected the WEKA® Data Platform to provide the critical software infrastructure required to increase the performance and efficiency of the new accelerated compute service offering.
“When we started building our AI Supercloud solution, we looked at several data platforms and parallel filesystem solutions. The environment’s extreme scale and performance demands quickly removed other vendors from consideration,” said Chris Starkey, cofounder and CEO at NexGen Cloud. “The WEKA 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 enabled us to leverage existing hardware investments and power all of our cloud services as efficiently and sustainably as possible, which is core to our mission.”
WEKA’s data platform software provides unparalleled performance and scale to efficiently feed data to large-scale GPU environments, turning stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines that seamlessly fuel data-starved GPUs, helping them to run more efficiently and sustainably – and up to 20x faster. With WEKA, NexGen Cloud improves the experience for its customer base by enabling huge quantities of data to be accessed and processed faster regardless of file size, letting them focus their efforts on the algorithms instead of managing the underlying data architecture.
“The WEKA Data Platform is providing NexGen Cloud with the extreme speed and scale we need to power our next-generation GPU environment and help enterprise customers of every stripe 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’re confident they will grow and innovate with us as we continue to grow and evolve our Hyperstack and AI Supercloud offerings to meet our customers’ future AI requirements.”
“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 to run at peak performance and efficiency, reducing energy consumption and giving customers a much more sustainable way to run enterprise AI workloads – even at extreme scale. We are excited to partner with NexGen Cloud to bring their ambitious AI Supercloud to market and help them to propel the future with democratized access to the world’s most powerful GPUs.”
