Tasmania-headquartered Firmus Technologies has partnered with Singapore-based data centre provider ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) to provide GPU and AI cloud services.
The venture will be based in Singapore and will see the launch of a graphics processing unit-centric infrastructure as a service offering focused on deep learning artificial intelliigence and visual computing workloads, dubbed Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC).
SMC aims to deliver bare-metal-service access to high-performance AI clusters, which include some of the world’s most advanced workload accelerators including GPUs and networking from NVIDIA.
The partnership will see SMC leverage Firmus’ proprietary, scaled, immersion-cooled platform, called the HyperCube, which is hosted within global STT GDC facilities, to deliver sustainable AI factories.
According to Firmus, the combination of its immersion-cooled computing platform, paired with STT GDC’s data centre infrastructure, will result in AI workloads running with a improved power usage efficiency (PUE) and lower CO2 emissions.
Firmus and STT GDC are launching SMC in Singapore, India and Australia in 2023.
The Singapore launch is expected to be live in the second half of 2023.
Firmus Technologies chairman Ted Pretty said the venture is a “world first and brings together Firmus’ scaled immersion-cooled computing platform with STT GDC’s global footprint, based on NVIDIA’s deep learning and visual computing architecture”
“This offering will be underpinned by STT GDC’s globally recognised and award-winning data centres,” he added.
Through this venture, Pretty said the company aims to “break the mould of the traditional data centre model."
"They imagined the data centre as an entire computing platform — a ‘Sustainable AI Factory’ — and ensuring that this computing platform is best-in-class in terms of sustainability, operating and capital cost effectiveness.”
“The vision of this venture is to combine STT GDC’s strength – being one of the world’s largest data centre infrastructure groups – with that of our HyperCube platform to deliver what we believe is a wholly unique proposition in delivering AI and visual computing at scale not seen before in Asia or Europe.”