Nvidia And AI Provider Lambda Raises $320M; CEO Plans To Build 'No. 1 Compute Platform’ In World
CEO Stephen Balaban says with the new funding, his Silicon Valley-based company will “accelerate” the growth of its GPU cloud.
“Lambda’s mission is to build the No. 1 AI compute platform in the world,” said Lambda CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban in a blog post today. “To accomplish this, we’ll need lots of Nvidia GPUs, ultra-fast networking, lots of data center space, and lots of great new software to delight you and your AI engineering team.”
Balaban said with the new $320 million in funding, his Silicon Valley-based company will “accelerate” the growth of its GPU cloud, ensuring AI engineering teams have access to thousands of Nvidia GPUs with high-speed Nvidia Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.
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Founded in 2012, Lambda provides fast access to the latest GPUs and architectures for training, fine-tuning and inferencing of generative AI and large language models (LLMs).
Lambda was one of the first cloud providers to make Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs available on-demand in the public cloud. Lambda’s product portfolio spans from on-prem GPU hardware to hosted GPUs in the cloud.
The Series C funding round was led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology with participation from new investors B Capital, SK Telecom, and existing investors Crescent Cove, Mercato Partners, 1517 Fund, Bloomberg Beta, and Gradient Ventures, to name a few.
Lambda Customers Include Microsoft, Amazon, U.S. Government
Lambda’s hardware and private cloud business serves over 5,000 customers in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and the U.S. government.
Currently, Lambda customers span enterprises like Microsoft and Amazon, research universities, the U.S. government, and other clients across manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services.
“Building the world’s No. 1 AI compute platform (in the cloud and on-prem!) is challenging work and today’s announcement wouldn’t have happened without the incredible team we’ve assembled,” said Lambda CEO.
Lambda has over a decade of experience building AI infrastructure at scale and has amassed over 100,000 customer sign-ups on Lambda Cloud.
Amid a global GPU supply shortage driven by increased demand from generative AI, Lambda is looking to help capture mind share of the GenAI market.
“Over the next 10 years, every human endeavor will be augmented by the integration of LLMs and generative AI,” said Balaban. “This AI rollout is going to require a lot of GPUs. This latest financing supports our mission to make GPU compute as ubiquitous as electricity.