Launch of AI cloud infrastructure Vultr raised $333 million in growth financing at a $3.5 billion valuation, marking the ten-year-old startup’s first external financing round.
He co-led the transaction AMD venturesthe enterprise arm of the semiconductor company AMD — highlighting the fierce competition among chipmakers to provide AI infrastructure to enterprises.
LuminArx Capital Management was the second fundamental investor in the transaction. West Palm Beach, Florida-based Vultr says it plans to use the latest capital to buy more GPUs, or GPUs, that are in high demand to run models with large languages.
“Vultr’s deep experience in delivering secure, compliant and scalable cloud infrastructure and implementing AMD Instinct accelerators positions it as an innovative cloud solutions provider.” Mateusz HeinAMD senior vice chairman and director of corporate development strategy said in: statement. “We share Vultr’s mission to provide enterprises and AI innovators with unparalleled access to high-performance computing to develop and deploy AI models, and we are proud to support their development.”
Together with rivals Nvidia AND IntelAMD and its enterprise arm have been energetic investors in this 12 months’s startup financing deals for AI-related firms. These include:
- In March, AMD Ventures participated in the $175 million Series C project to launch optical interconnects Celestial Artificial Intelligencewhose photonic platform helps separate computing power from memory, making the processing of advanced artificial intelligence faster and calculations more energy efficient;
- In May, AMD Ventures i Intel capital took part AI scalesa massive $1 billion round that valued the launch of data labeling and assessment at $13.8 billion;
- In July, creator of large language models Cohere closed a $450 million investment with AMD Ventures and Nvidia as investors;
- AMD led the $250 million round Fluid artificial intelligencea startup that earlier this month created models based on liquid foundations, or lightweight, general-purpose AI models that require less data and computing power; AND
- AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Nvidia participated in a $155 million Series D investment to launch optical connections Setting up the labsalso earlier this month.
“AMD is trying to find a way to become more competitive with Nvidia” Dave McCarthyvice chairman of cloud and edge services research at a research company International data company, he said Wall Street Journalspeaking of Vultr financing. “For AMD, the opportunity to achieve good settlements with an emerging cloud service provider like Vultr will help them gain greater visibility in the market.”