Credit: Firmus Technologies
Tasmania-based Firmus Technologies has partnered with Singapore’s ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) to create artificial intelligence 'factories'.
The deal will consist of an investment and creating a collaborative venture from ST Telemedia for the development of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) known as Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC).
According to ST Telemedia, SMC will deliver bare-metal-service access to high-performance artificial intelligence clusters, which include GPUs and networking from NVIDIA.
SMC will leverage Firmus’ proprietary, scaled, immersion-cooled platform —the ‘HyperCube’— hosted within global STT GDC locations, to deliver Sustainable AI Factories.
SMC will launch in Singapore, India and Australia, with the Singapore hub expected to be live in H2 2023.
Ted Pretty, Firmus Technologies chairman said it was always the company’s vision to “break the mould of the traditional data centre model”.
“[STT} 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.
“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 a scale not seen before in Asia or Europe.”
After the first deployment in Singapore, the subsequent expansion will be into the Indian market in 2023. In 2024 and beyond, the deployment of Sustainable Metal Cloud availability zones (AZs) will be expanded across the STT GDC portfolio.
“STT GDC, in partnership with Firmus, is committed to providing sustainable and foundational compute infrastructure,” said Bruno Lopez, president and group CEO of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.
“Singapore was the location of choice for our first flagship installation given the city’s leadership in AI and sustainability. Through our new bare-metal service, customers will have early access to cost-effective and large-scale GPU compute through Firmus’ embedded AI compute platform with leading-edge liquid immersion technology.”
