WSS: More large-scale GPU deals along with webscale consumption as strategic developments continue
The last week of the year saw more developments that reflect the ongoing momentum in the sector. Fluidstack continues to lease capacity from former cryptocurrency-focused firms, signing a 245MW deal with Hut 8 in Louisiana. Fluidstack, with the support of Google, has signed close to 1GW worth of colocation leases in the last several months as it gets set to support a significant off-taker.
While the GPU-oriented neoclouds are seeing significant growth and expansion, there is also activity in the webscale space that sometimes get overlooked. DigitalOcean just signed a substantial deal that will see it run GPUs on its cloud infrastructure platform for Persistent Systems, showing that there are definitely a wide range of deployment sizes and requirements out there for GPU-oriented AI workloads.
The last several months have seen an uptick in strategic activity oriented to technology acquisitions. The latest move saw OpenAI acquire a company called Neptune to enhance its overall model training capabilities. And just before Christmas, Groq confirmed that it had agreed to a $20b licensing arrangement with NVIDIA for its inferencing chips and technology. The details are sparse and NVIDIA has not yet officially confirmed anything, but NVIDIA looks to be bringing on some of the Groq founders even as Groq will be left to run independently, likely focusing on its cloud infrastructure platform. We will have more details soon.
Finally, the week saw multiple developments in Finland, with Meta exploring a data centre project there and DayOne in Singapore raising capital for projects in the region. Meanwhile, AirTrunk was busy as well, picking up a site for expansion in Melbourne and confirming plans for a second data centre in Osaka, Japan.
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