AI cloud infrastructure startup Vultr has raised $333 million in growth capital at a valuation of $3.5 billion, marking the 10-year-old startup’s first round of external funding.
The deal was co-led by AMD Ventures, the venture arm of semiconductor company AMD, and highlights the fierce competition among chipmakers to provide AI infrastructure to companies.
LuminArx Capital Management was the other lead investor in the transaction. West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Vultr said it plans to use the new capital to acquire more high-demand graphics processing units (GPUs) to power its large-scale language models. are.
“Vultr’s extensive experience delivering secure, compliant, and scalable cloud infrastructure, and the introduction of AMD Instinct accelerators, positions Vultr as an innovative cloud solutions provider,” said AMD Senior. Mathew Hein, vice president and chief strategy officer for corporate development, said in a statement. “We share Vultr’s mission to provide enterprises and AI innovators with unparalleled access to high-performance computing for developing and deploying AI models, and we are proud to support their growth. I think so.”
Along with rivals Nvidia and Intel, AMD and its venture arm have been aggressively investing in startup capital deals for AI-related companies this year. They include:
In March, AMD Ventures participated in a $175 million Series C in optical interconnect startup Celestial AI. The company’s photonic fabric platform helps decouple compute and memory, speeding up extensive AI processing and making computing more energy efficient. In May, AMD Ventures and Intel Capital participated in Scale AI’s massive $1 billion round, which valued the data labeling and assessment startup at $13.8 billion. In July, Cohere, a large-scale language modeler, finalized a $450 million investment that counted AMD Ventures as well as NVIDIA as investors. AMD led Liquid AI’s $250 million round earlier this month. The company is a startup that has developed a liquid foundation model, a lightweight general-purpose AI model that requires less data and computing power. AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and Nvidia all participated in a $155 million Series D for optical interconnect startup Ayar Labs, also earlier this month.
“AMD is looking for ways to better compete with Nvidia,” Dave McCarthy, vice president of research for cloud and edge services at research firm International Data Corp., told the Wall Street Journal that Vultr’s He talked about funding. “For AMD, getting better rates from up-and-coming cloud providers like Vultr could help increase its visibility in the market.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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