Vultr Secures $333M Funding, Reaching $3.5B Valuation with AMD Backing for AI Infrastructure Expansion

Vultr Achieves $3.5 Billion Valuation

The new funding will enable Vultr to expand its AI infrastructure and cloud computing offerings, making it a strong alternative to traditional hyperscalers. JJ Kardwell, CEO of Vultr, announced on LinkedIn that the company, a leading independent cloud infrastructure provider, has achieved a valuation of $3.5 billion after securing funding from LuminArx Capital Management and AMD. The funding highlights the rising demand for AI infrastructure and marks a major milestone for the company. Founded in 2014 by David Aninowsky, Vultr has grown solely on operating cash flow and has become a major player in cloud computing. "This new financing accelerates our growth in AI infrastructure and cloud computing as we build the category-defining independent cloud infrastructure company," he said. The new funding will enable Vultr to expand its AI infrastructure and cloud computing offerings, making it a strong alternative to traditional hyperscalers. Vultr's mission is to deliver high-performance cloud services that are affordable, accessible, and easy to use. Its offerings include cloud compute, cloud GPU, bare metal, and cloud storage, and it serves hundreds of thousands of active customers across 185 countries. In related developments, CoreWeave, a specialised cloud provider focused on GPU-powered workloads, secured $2.3 billion in financing last year. Magnetar Capital and Blackstone Tactical Opportunities led the funding, with contributions from BlackRock, Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), Coatue, and Carlyle. The financing supports CoreWeave's plans to increase computing capacity, open new data centres, and expand its workforce to meet the growing demand for AI applications like LLMs and generative AI. Meanwhile, AMD has enhanced its efforts to close the GPU performance gap with NVIDIA. AMD CEO Lisa Su recently announced the MI325 advanced GPU accelerator, calling it a "game-changing product" set to rival NVIDIA's H200. Meanwhile, the MI350 series aims to compete with NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs. Expressing optimism, Su stated that AMD expects to close the performance gap faster than anticipated with its new hardware. Andrew Dieckmann, CVP and GM of data centre GPU at AMD, also commented on the company's progress. "We are trying to take very representative benchmarks that are realistic. I can tell you that in our customer engagements, especially regarding inference workloads, we have yet to find a single workload on which we cannot outperform NVIDIA," he said. He, however, acknowledged that AMD doesn't always outperform its rivals. As competition intensifies in the AI and cloud infrastructure market, Vultr, CoreWeave, and AMD are working to meet the growing demands of enterprises and innovators worldwide.

AMD backs $333M funding round for cloud provider Vultr - SiliconANGLE

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. Vultr also offers more advanced infrastructure options, including bare-metal servers and a Kubernetes platform, as well as multiple types of data storage. Vultr 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 that the AMD-backed funding round announced today will go towards 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 MI300X 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.

AMD backs $333M funding round for cloud infrastructure provider Vultr - SiliconANGLE

AMD backs $333M funding round for cloud infrastructure provider Vultr 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. Vultr also offers more advanced infrastructure options, including bare-metal servers and a Kubernetes platform, as well as multiple types of data storage. Vultr 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 that the AMD-backed funding round announced today will go towards 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 MI300X 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.

Start-up Vultr hits $3.5bn valuation in funding frenzy for AI cloud groups

Data centre operator Vultr has raised $333mn of capital from investors including chipmaker AMD, scaling up its bet that companies looking to deploy artificial intelligence will seek alternatives to so-called "hyperscalers" such as Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet. The fundraising, led by investment manager LuminArx, gives Vultr a valuation of $3.5bn, unusually high for a company that had not previously raised external equity capital. The average valuation for companies receiving first-time financing is $51mn, according to PitchBook. Vultr runs a cloud computing platform on which customers can run applications and store data remotely. The 10-year-old company plans to use the funds to expand its data centre offering and purchase graphics processing units (GPUs), the AI chips that have quickly become the tech world's hottest commodity. Silicon Valley has embarked on a frenzy of investment in AI data centres powered by GPUs in order to develop large language models such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT. The 10 biggest cloud companies -- dubbed hyperscalers -- are on track to allocate $326bn to capital expenditure in 2025, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley. While most depend heavily on chips made by Nvidia, large companies including Google, Amazon and Facebook are designing their own customised silicon to perform specialised tasks. Away from the tech mega-caps, emerging "neocloud" companies such as Vultr, CoreWeave, Lambda Labs and Nebius have raised billions of dollars of debt and equity in the past year in a bet on the expanding power and computing needs of AI models. Compared with Nvidia, AMD is a distant second in designing GPUs, part of a market for AI chips that Bank of America analysts estimates will be worth $276bn by 2027. AMD, run by Lisa Su, is planning to roll out a new chip, the MI355X, to compete with Nvidia's Blackwell range, which went into mass production during the current quarter. Vultr uses chips from both suppliers. Chief marketing officer Kevin Cochrane said the capital raising left the company with "freedom and flexibility" regarding its investment decisions, and added that AMD and LuminArx were "long-term strategic partners". The race to train sophisticated AI models has inspired the commissioning of increasingly large "supercomputers" that link up hundreds of thousands of high-performance chips. Elon Musk's start-up xAI built its Colossus supercomputer in just three months and has pledged to increase it tenfold. Meanwhile, Amazon is building a GPU cluster alongside Anthropic, developer of the Claude AI models. The ecommerce group has invested $8bn in Anthropic. Vultr's plan to expand its network of data centres, currently in 32 locations, is a bet that customers will seek greater proximity to their computing infrastructure as they move from training to "inference" -- industry parlance for using models to perform calculations and make decisions.

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

AI cloud infrastructure startup Vultr raised $333 million in growth financing at a $3.5 billion valuation, marking the decade-old startup's first outside round of financing. The deal was co-led by AMD Ventures, the venture arm of semiconductor company AMD -- underscoring the fierce competition between chipmakers to provide AI infrastructure for enterprises. LuminArx Capital Management was the other lead investor in the deal. West Palm Beach, Florida-based Vultr says it plans to use the new capital to acquire more graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are in hot demand to power large language models. "Vultr's deep experience delivering secure, compliant and scalable cloud infrastructure and their deployment of AMD Instinct accelerators positions them as an innovative cloud solutions provider," Mathew Hein, AMD's senior vice president and chief strategy officer of corporate development, said in a statement. "We share Vultr's mission to empower enterprises and AI innovators with unparalleled access to high-performance compute for AI model development and deployment and are proud to support their growth." Along with rivals Nvidia and Intel, AMD and its venture arm have been active investors in startup funding deals this year for AI-related companies. They include: "AMD is trying to figure out how to become more competitive with Nvidia," Dave McCarthy, a research vice president in cloud and edge services at research firm International Data Corp, told The Wall Street Journal, speaking about the Vultr funding. "For AMD to be able to get good billing with an up-and-coming cloud provider like Vultr will help them get more visibility in the market."

AMD and LuminArx boost cloud startup Vultr with $333 million funding By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) and hedge fund LuminArx Capital Management have jointly raised $333 million in a growth financing round for cloud startup Vultr, indicating strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The West Palm Beach, Florida-based Vultr, now valued at $3.5 billion, plans to use the financing to acquire more graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that power AI models. Vultr, originally providing cloud-computing for businesses' information-technology systems, also offers AI computing. The company anticipates its AI cloud service, where it leases GPU access to customers, to soon become the largest part of its business. For AMD, the investment is a strategy to introduce customers to AMD GPUs through Vultr's platform, according to Mathew Hein, AMD's chief strategy officer of corporate development. Hein sees Vultr as a key player in expanding AMD capacity in the present and future generations. While AMD aspires to be Vultr's "preferred" AI hardware provider, Hein stated that the choice will not be imposed on Vultr. Earlier this year, AMD introduced its latest generation of AI chips, the MI325X, and plans to launch the next generation, MI350 chips, next year. Earlier this month, Vultr revealed plans to construct its first "supercompute" cluster with thousands of AMD GPUs at its Chicago-area data center. This funding round is reminiscent of similar moves by AI chip market leader Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), which, along with other investors, provided over $400 million to AI cloud provider CoreWeave in 2023. CoreWeave also secured $2.3 billion in debt financing last year by using its Nvidia GPUs as collateral. Both Nvidia and AMD have distributed access to their GPUs to a large number of cloud providers. Dave McCarthy, a research vice president in cloud and edge services at research firm International Data Corp (IDC), stated that AMD's association with an emerging cloud provider like Vultr could enhance its market visibility. AMD's previous investments include cloud providers such as TensorWave, which also provides an AI cloud service. In August, AMD acquired data-center equipment designer ZT Systems for nearly $5 billion.

AMD and LuminArx invest $333 million in cloud startup Vultr- report By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) and hedge fund LuminArx Capital Management have invested $333 million in a growth financing round for cloud startup Vultr, indicating growing demand for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. West Palm Beach-based Vultr, now valued at $3.5 billion, plans to use the funding to acquire more graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that power AI models. This funding marks Vultr's first receipt of outside capital. The company initially provided cloud-computing for businesses' information-technology systems and now also offers AI computing. Vultr's AI cloud service, which leases GPU access to customers, is expected to become the largest segment of its business. AMD views this investment as an opportunity for customers to experience its GPUs through Vultr's platform, according to Mathew Hein, AMD's chief strategy officer of corporate development. AMD plans to be Vultr's preferred AI hardware provider, without enforcing this preference. Earlier this year, AMD introduced its latest generation of AI chips, the MI325X, and plans to release the next generation, the MI350 chips, next year. Vultr recently announced plans to construct its first supercompute cluster, featuring thousands of AMD GPUs, at its data center in the Chicago area. This investment in Vultr echoes similar moves by AI chip market leader Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), which, along with other investors, provided over $400 million to AI cloud provider CoreWeave in 2023. CoreWeave also secured $2.3 billion in debt financing last year by using its Nvidia GPUs as collateral. Both Nvidia and AMD have expanded access to their GPUs among numerous cloud providers. AMD's investment in Vultr is part of its strategy to increase competitiveness with Nvidia, according to Dave McCarthy, a research vice president in cloud and edge services at International Data Corp (IDC). McCarthy noted that AMD's association with an emerging cloud provider like Vultr could enhance its market visibility. AMD has also invested in cloud providers such as TensorWave, which offers an AI cloud service. In August, AMD acquired data-center equipment designer ZT Systems for nearly $5 billion.