Cloud infrastructure startup Vultr Inc. today disclosed that it has raised a $333 million funding round at a $3.5 billion valuation.

LuminArx Capital Management and AMD Ventures jointly led the investment. It marks the first time Vultr has raised equity funding since launching about a decade ago. In 2021, it secured a $150 million credit facility from Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

Vultr operates a cloud platform powered by a network of 32 data centers. The company provides low-cost instances that start at $2.5 per month. It also offers more advanced infrastructure options, including bare-metal servers and a Kubernetes platform, as well as multiple types of data storage.

The company provides its core infrastructure portfolio alongside managed services. The latter product lineup includes databases, as well as an artificial intelligence inference service that debuted earlier this year. The latter offering automatically adjusts the amount of infrastructure provisioned for an AI model based on user demand.

Vultr says the AMD-backed funding round announced today will go toward enhancing its AI offering. According to the Wall Street Journal, AMD hopes to become the company’s “preferred” AI hardware supplier. Vultr will use the capital to buy more graphics cards and grow its international data center footprint.

Earlier this month, the cloud provider launched an AI supercomputing cluster in an Illinois co-location facility operated by a partner. The system is powered by several thousand of AMD’s MI300X machine learning accelerators.

The MI300X includes eight graphics processing unit chiplets made using a five-nanometer process. They’re installed atop four six-nanometer chiplets that manage the flow of data in and out of the processor. The MI300X’s stacked circuits are supported by a 256-megabyte cache that enables information to move between the chiplets, plus eight HBM3 memory modules with 192 gigabytes of aggregate capacity.

The chips in Vultr’s cluster are linked together using Ethernet networking equipment from Broadcom Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. Running on top is ROCm, an AMD-developed software toolkit. It helps companies optimize the performance of the AI applications they deploy on the chipmaker’s silicon.

Vultr’s funding round comes a few days after Nscale Inc., another startup that provides cloud infrastructure for AI workloads, closed a nine-figure investment of its own. The latter company also operates a supercomputing cluster powered by AMD chips. The system, which is known as the Svartisen Cluster and features 66,528 cores, recently nabbed the 156th spot on the Top500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Investors have also backed several other players in the AI infrastructure market. CoreWeave Inc., the operator of a cloud platform optimized for machine learning, recently received a $23 billion valuation in a $650 million secondary sale. Earlier this year, rival Lambda Inc. raised $320 million to upgrade its AI capabilities. 

Image: Unsplash