Singapore-based data centre operator ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) is partnering with Australia-based Firmus Technologies to launch a GPU-centric Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering focused on deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) and visual computing workloads, to be known as Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC).
SMC will leverage Firmus’ proprietary, scaled, immersion-cooled platform – the HyperCube – hosted within global STT GDC locations to create AI "factories".
The company said SMC will deliver bare-metal-service access to high-performance AI clusters, which include GPUs and high-speed networking from NVIDIA. It is soon expected to launch in Singapore, India and Australia, with the Singapore hub expected to be live in the second half of 2023.
Firmus Technologies chairman, Ted Pretty, said the company has always envisioned "to break the mould of the traditional data centre model”.
“STT GDC 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,” he said.
STT GDC's President and Group Chief Executive, Bruno Lopez, said that this new venture will convert data centres into AI factories, enabling customers to process workloads.
In a LinkedIn post, he wrote: "Extremely excited about this opportunity to partner with Firmus to jointly fill the market gap with the right solution addressing computational demand with sustainable, scalable cooling infrastructure."
Following the initial deployment in Singapore, the expansion is planned for the Indian market in 2023. Additional expansions of SMC availability zones across the STT GDC portfolio are planned for 2024 and beyond, the company said.
