Vultr, a startup that rents out graphics processing units and other cloud infrastructure to enterprises, raised $333 million in a deal that valued the company at $3.5 billion. AMDIts venture capital arm and hedge fund LuminArx Capital Management led this round of financing.

Founded in 2014, Vultr is known as a low-cost virtual server provider, offering GPUs from AMD and competitors NVIDIADue to the boom in generative artificial intelligence, it is in high demand. Although Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase agreed to provide the company with a $150 million credit line in 2021, this is the first equity financing for the company.

NVIDIAThe biggest beneficiary of the AI ​​wave so far has invested in specialist cloud provider CoreWeave. AMD’s CPUs are also available through Vultr, in addition Intel’s.

Unlike some of the top cloud providers, Vultr doesn’t have its own AI chips to compete with AMD or Nvidia.

“We’re never looking to build a GPU and compete with that layer,” Vultr CEO JJ Kardwell said in an interview with CNBC.

Cardwell said AMD offers very good pricing based on the performance of the inference phase of AI models, which is critical for organizations deploying AI at scale. Companies typically use large amounts of data and large amounts of GPUs to train AI models before entering the inference phase, when the model responds to or makes inferences about new information.

Vultr said in a statement that the new capital injection will be used for international expansion. statement. The company currently has 32 data center locations, mostly outside North America. Customers include Microsoft’s According to Activision Blizzard wall street journalearlier reported on Vultr’s funding.

digital oceanIt is a competitor of Vulr. It went public in 2021 and is currently valued at $3.5 billion.

watch: Goldman Sachs’ Eric Sheridan says cloud environment remains ‘very healthy’