Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs | TechCrunch
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CoreWeave and other alternative clouds, fueled by the generative AI boom, are doing gangbusters. But is this sustainable?
  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    1·
    2 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Case in point: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital.

    The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it’s investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers.

    Nvidia, the furnisher of the bulk of CoreWeave’s chips, sees this as a desirable trend, perhaps for leverage reasons; it’s said to have given some alternative cloud providers preferential access to its GPUs.

    Lee Sustar, principal analyst at Forrester, sees cloud vendors like CoreWeave succeeding in part because they don’t have the infrastructure “baggage” that incumbent providers have to deal with.

    He believes that alternative cloud providers’ expansion will be conditioned by whether they can continue to bring GPUs online in high volume, and offer them at competitively low prices.

    Competing on pricing might become challenging down the line as incumbents like Google, Microsoft and AWS ramp up investments in custom hardware to run and train models.

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