European cloud provider OVHcloud has got its eager paws on some sought after NVIDIA kit – with NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA L40S and NVIDIA L4 powered instances all coming, “effective deployment ramping up in the coming weeks” and some instances available today.
That's good news for European companies with a fundamental allergy to US hyperscalers and lets OVHcloud marry its "data sovereignty" emphasis with some cutting edge hardware capabilities for customers.
Data centres (hyperscale, mid-market and enterprise) around the world are investing heavily in optimising their racks and networks amid surging demand for heavy customer data crunching including AI amid what NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang described earlier in 2023 on a call as a surge of “incredible orders to retool the world's data centres.”
(NVIDIA saw an almost overnight $200 billion spike in market cap in May after nearly doubling expected sales across what Huang described to analysts as $1 trillion of global installed data centre infrastructure.)
OVHcloud NVIDIA instances: You pays your money…
“AI will seriously transform our clients’ businesses and we are in a unique position to help them easily transition to this new era… with the most sought-after GPUs, we provide world-class performance with all the benefits of the cloud. Our AI solutions customers will also benefit from these novelties through our easy-to-use AI Notebooks, AI Training and AI Deploy offers.” said Michel Paulin, CEO OVHcloud today.
OVHCloud said NVIDIA A100 80GB powered GPU instances are “immediately available and let AI specialists run complex projects on highly specialized NVIDIA Tensor Cores” at €2.75/hour (£2.83) for A100-180; €5.50/hour for A100-360 ; €11/hour for A100-720 instances.
Lower down the market it also now has GPU instances featuring NVIDIA L4 GPUs with 24GB of memory becoming available in October 2023, describing these as a “universal GPU for every workload with enhanced AI and video capabilities. It provides efficient compute resources for graphics, simulation, data science and data analytics.”
Managed AI solutions based on A100 will be available at €3/hour and NVIDIA H100 PCIe-based instances in the “public cloud universe” will launch later this fall with pre-reservation starting now” OVHcloud said.
The company has bounced back strongly from a challenging 2021 and now provides 450,000 servers within 37 data centers across four continents to reach 1.6 million customers in over 140 countries. It clinched a €200 million credit facility from the European Investment Bank in 2022 which it used to help kickstart an aggressive expansion plan – 36% of its own revenues are also allocated to growth capex – and is touting impressive efficiency figures as it grows: The EIB notes that OVHcloud achieves the cloud industry’s best ratios in energy efficiency (PUE between 1.1 and 1.3, compared to an industry average of 1.57) and water consumption (average WUE of 0.26 l/kWh, compared to an industry average of 1.8).
