ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), a Singapore-based data centre provider, has announced an investment in a global joint venture with Firmus Technologies, a company specialising in immersion-cooled computing platforms.
The partnership will launch an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering focused on AI and visual computing workloads, named Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC).
SMC will provide access to AI clusters, which include workload accelerators and high-speed networking from NVIDIA. The aim is to promote energy-efficient computing, the company said in a statement.
The venture will use Firmus’ proprietary ‘HyperCube’ platform, hosted within STT GDC’s locations, to create AI factories. These factories will house high-performance servers in an immersion-cooled environment, supplied by OEM partners such as Supermicro.
Firmus and STT GDC plan to introduce SMC in Singapore, India, and Australia in 2023, with the Singapore AZ operational in the second half of 2023. The joint venture intends to operate AI workloads with a lower PUE, reduced CO2 emissions, and increased petaflops per watt by combining Firmus’ computing platform and STT GDC’s data centre infrastructure.
Ted Pretty, Chairman, Firmus Technologies, said: “This venture combines Firmus’ computing platform with STT GDC’s global footprint, based on NVIDIA’s architecture that is contributing to growth in AI,” he said.
He mentioned the founders’ intent to change the traditional data centre model by creating a ‘Sustainable AI Factory’ with a focus on sustainability, operating cost, and capital cost effectiveness.
STT GDC’s President and Group Chief Executive, Bruno Lopez, stated that STT GDC, in association with Firmus, is dedicated to providing sustainable and foundational compute infrastructure. He mentioned that this new venture will convert data centres into AI factories, enabling customers to process workloads.
Following the initial deployment in Singapore, the expansion is planned for the Indian market in 2023. Additional expansions of Sustainable Metal Cloud availability zones across the STT GDC portfolio are planned for 2024 and beyond, said the company.
