AI Cloud Startup Vultr Raises $333M At $3.5B In First Outside Funding Round

AI cloud infrastructure startup Urtel It raised $333 million in growth financing at a $3.5 billion valuation, marking the 10-year-old startup’s first round of outside funding.

The transaction is made by AMD Venturesthe venture capital arm of a semiconductor company AMD — Highlighting the fierce competition among chip manufacturers to provide artificial intelligence infrastructure to enterprises.

LuminArx Capital Management is the other major investor in the deal. Vultr, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, said it plans to use the new funds to purchase more graphics processing units (GPUs) to power large language models, for which there is an urgent need.

“Vultr’s extensive experience in delivering secure, compliant and scalable cloud infrastructure and their deployment of AMD Instinct accelerators positions them as an innovative cloud solutions provider.” Matthew HeinAMD senior vice president and chief strategy officer of corporate development said in the report statement. “We share Vultr’s mission to provide enterprises and AI innovators with unparalleled high-performance computing capabilities for the development and deployment of AI models, and are proud to support their development.”

with competitors NVIDIA and IntelAMD and its venture capital arm have been active investors in new venture financing deals for artificial intelligence-related companies this year. They include:

• In March, AMD Ventures participated Series C financing of US$175 million For optical interconnect startup Celestial Artificial Intelligencewhose photonic structure platform helps separate computing and memory, making a wide range of artificial intelligence processing faster and computing more energy-efficient;
• In May, AMD Ventures and Intel Capital participated in Artificial intelligence scalevery big $1 billion in financing The data labeling and assessment startup is valued at $13.8 billion;
• July, large language model creator coherent lock up US$450 million investment AMD Ventures and Nvidia are investors;
• AMD Led $250 million in financing for Liquid Artificial Intelligencea startup that earlier this month created liquid base models, or lightweight, general-purpose artificial intelligence models that require less data and computing power; and
• AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and Nvidia all participated US$155 million in Series D financing For optical interconnect startup Set up the labalso earlier this month.

“AMD is trying to figure out how to compete with Nvidia,” Dave McCarthyvice president of cloud and edge services research at the research firm International Data Corporation, Tell wall street journaltalking about Vultr funding. “AMD’s ability to achieve strong results with emerging cloud providers like Vultr will help them gain more visibility in the market.”

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Illustration: Dom Guzman