STT GDC and Firmus to build sustainable AI factories
Author: Isha Jain
ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) has announced a significant investment into a global venture with Firmus Technologies.
The venture is to be based in Singapore and will see the launch of a GPU-centric Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering focused on deep learning AI and visual computing workloads, to be known as Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC).
SMC will deliver bare-metal-service access to high-performance AI clusters, which include some of the world’s most advanced workload accelerators including GPUs and high-speed networking from NVIDIA for energy-efficient computing.
It will leverage Firmus’ proprietary, scaled, immersion-cooled platform, the HyperCube, to deliver sustainable AI factories that are all at once sustainable, scalable, high-performance and cost-effective.
Within the HyperCube, Firmus will operate a fleet of high-performance servers provided by OEM partners including Supermicro. It unlocks access to world-class AI tools and hardware in a highly available way.
The SMC is being launched in Singapore, India and Australia in 2023, with the Singapore AZ (SIN01) expected to be live in H2 2023.
The combination of Firmus’ platform, paired with STT GDC’s highly efficient data centre infrastructure, will result in AI workloads running with a lower PUE, lower CO2 emissions and higher petaflops per watt.
“The compound growth in forecasted energy consumption is an existential threat to the data centre sector. Data centre operators and their customers must be prepared to embrace and support new cooling solutions and expand the services they offer beyond traditional air-cooled colocation if they are to host AI GPU platforms in a sustainable manner. The evolution of the data centre into AI factories of the future will fundamentally change the way that all infrastructure operators are thinking about the design and operation of their facilities. STT GDC’s foresight and long-term vision made them the ideal global partner for Firmus’ highly developed solution,” says Ted.
“The future of data centres will rely on the ability to provide both exceptional performance and highly sustainable services at scale. From our beginnings in Singapore almost 10 years ago, we now have scaled the business to cover 10 geographies. We are immensely pleased to enhance our core co-location offering to include the latest GPU-based bare-metal services, empowering our customers with access to the next generation of high-performance computing which will be so critical in the AI revolution. These high-performance services are a key component of the critical infrastructure needed to support the plethora of AI use cases that will be critical to business, governments and society in years to come,” says Bruno Lopez, President and Group Chief Executive, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.
