The 20 Hottest AI Cloud Companies: The 2024 CRN AI 100

From AWS and Microsoft Azure to Altair, MongoDB and Dynatrace, here are the 20 cloud AI companies you need to know about in 2024.

Cloud computing technology is one of the best delivery options for AI and generative AI applications at scale with tech giants including Amazon Web Services, IBM, Google, Oracle and Microsoft investing billions into building new AI offerings over the past 18 months.

“Because of its scale and shared services model, cloud technology is best-suited for the delivery of GenAI-enabled applications at scale and the development of general-purpose foundation models,” said Sid Nag, Gartner vice president and analyst, in a recent report.

However, these technology behemoths aren’t the only ones jostling for market share in the red-hot AI cloud market, as companies such as Altair, Dataminr, MongoDB and Lambda Labs are innovating at breakneck speed.

There are also open-source players like H2O.ai and Red Hat, which also are winning over cloud customers this year with their ability to increase the productivity of developers and data engineers.

The rapid advancement in large language models (LLMs) and foundation models (FMs) are driving the continual evolution of AI and GenAI capabilities and business use cases.

Many of the 20 cloud AI companies on this list are leading the market in terms of LLMs and FMs, which are the core of GenAI capabilities.

“Specialty cloud providers will become an important consideration for many enterprise cloud architectures as organizations extend their cloud operations to cover diverse locations and use cases,” said Gartner’s Nag.

As part of CRN’s inaugural AI 100 list, here are the 20 cloud companies that are the driving force for AI in 2024 that solution providers should know about.

Altair

James Scapa

Founder, Chairman, CEO

Altair is a computational intelligence specialist that provides AI-powered software and cloud offerings for high-performance computing, simulations and data analytics. The company’s goal is to bring together data science and rocket science to enable customers to make smarter decisions via AI in sustainable manner.

Amazon Web Services

Adam Selipsky

CEO

The world’s largest cloud company has poured billions into building new AI and GenAI offerings, while also forming partnerships with AI players like Anthropic. AWS has launched new AI chatbot assistants, large language models, AI-powered cloud cybersecurity and even processors tailored for AI and machine learning use cases.

Cirrascale Cloud Services

PJ Go

CEO

Cirrascale Cloud Services provides public and private dedicated GPUs and Intelligence Processing Unit offerings and cloud infrastructure targeting large-scale deep learning use cases. Cirrascale works with AMD, Qualcomm and Nvidia to shape AI offerings to meet customers’ cloud services needs and provide GPU as a Service.

Dataminr

Ted Bailey

Founder, CEO

Harnessing the power of large language models and multimodal foundation models, Dataminr’s AI platform is at the forefront of AI innovation in predictive AI and GenAI—performing trillions of daily computations across billions of public data inputs. The AI provider seeks to empower security teams with tools to identify and respond to cyber risks and digital threats.

Dynatrace

Rick McConnell

CEO

The Dynatrace platform leverages hypermodal AI, combining predictive AI to anticipate future behaviors to deliver solutions and GenAI that offer recommendations and suggest workflows. Dynatrace’s deep observability and continuous runtime application security provides answers and intelligent automation from data at scale.

Google Cloud

Thomas Kurian

CEO

Google Cloud is a global provider of AI tools and GenAI offerings, including purpose-made infrastructure, GPUs, AI accelerants and APIs, chatbot collaborators and large language models. Google’s Vertex AI provides machine learning tools to automate and manage AI environments, while Gemini can generate code, text, images and videos.

H2O.ai

Sri Ambati

Founder, CEO

An open-source leader in GenAI and machine learning, H2O.ai has a community of 2 million data scientists tasked with co-creating GenAI applications. H2O.ai’s h2oGPTe platform, combined with its Document AI and autoML Driverless AI, have transformed over 20,000 organizations and over half of the Fortune 500.

HashiCorp

Dave McJannet

CEO

HashiCorp is a multi-cloud automation software company that enables customers to adopt consistent workflows and create a system of record for automating the cloud for AI. HashiCorp underpins some of the largest AI workloads on the market, helping customers manage their AI stack with infrastructure as code.

IBM

Arvind Krishna

Chairman, CEO

A longtime AI market force, IBM’s Watsonx.ai data platform is a studio for foundation models and machine learning with a set of AI assistants. Other innovations include Watsonx.data to support the entire data science life cycle and scaling of AI workloads, while Watsonx.governance manages and monitors customers’ AI projects.

Lambda Labs

Stephen Balaban

Founder, CEO

Lambda Labs is on a mission to build an AI compute platform with a portfolio spanning on-premises GPU hardware to hosted GPUs in the cloud. A top Nvidia processor provider, Lambda offers fast access to the latest GPUs and architectures for training, fine-tuning and inferencing of generative AI and large language models.

Microsoft

Satya Nadella

Chairman, CEO

Microsoft has invested billions into building a massive AI toolset while also forging game-changing partnerships with the likes of OpenAI. On the cloud front, Azure AI offers a framework for developing conversational AI, data analytics, IoT and more, while Microsoft’s AI collaborator Copilot helps businesses boost productivity and creativity.

MongoDB

Dev Ittycheria

President, CEO

MongoDB’s AI innovation inside its popular tools is exploding with the goal of helping developers quickly and easily build AI applications on its platform. This includes new AI chatbot features and AI-powered migration tools to MongoDB Atlas, which unifies operational, analytical and GenAI data services to streamline AI application building.

Nerdio

Vadim Vladimirskiy

Co-Founder, CEO

Microsoft cloud management software specialist Nerdio recently introduced GenAI assistants for scripted action generation, data analysis, report creation and other tasks to its portfolio. Nerdio strives to transform the management and cost optimization of virtual desktops, applications and Azure infrastructure, including via the infusion of AI into its products.

Oracle

Safra Catz

CEO

Oracle enables AI functionality throughout its cloud infrastructure, data platform and applications for a fully integrated experience. Oracle recently launched the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service that seamlessly integrates large language models with flexible fine-tuning options, while OCI AI Agents combines LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation with enterprise data.

PagerDuty

Jennifer Tejada

CEO

The PagerDuty Operations Cloud combines AIOps, automation, incident management and customer service operations into a scalable platform to boost innovation, reduce cost and mitigate the risk of operational failure. The operational management company recently launched PagerDuty Copilot to manage tasks via GenAI for critical operations work.

Red Hat

Matt Hicks

CEO

Open-source superstar Red Hat is enabling customers to use its software platforms to build, deploy and monitor AI models and applications. Red Hat OpenShift AI allows organizations to build, train, test and serve models for their AI-enabled applications with transparency and control.

Salesforce

Marc Benioff

Co-Founder, CEO

Salesforce has invested millions into its AI Einstein portfolio of AI technologies that combines CRM, AI and data insight into a unified platform. New innovation includes the conversational AI assistant Einstein Copilot, low-code AI toolset Einstein 1 Studio, and Einstein AI Prediction Builder to drive AI-powered business outcomes.

Snowflake

Sridhar Ramaswamy

CEO

Snowflake is injecting GenAI technologies throughout its data platform to empower next-level insight and data-driven decisions, including with Snowflake Cortex that uses machine learning to detect patterns and analyze data in order to build AI applications. Snowflake recently appointed Ramaswamy, its global AI leader, as its new CEO.

Spectro Cloud

Tenry Fu

Co-Founder, CEO

Kubernetes specialist Spectro Cloud recently has doubled down on AI with the launch of Palette EdgeAI that lets customers build, deploy and manage Kubernetes-based AI software stacks. The company’s EdgeAI enables businesses to deploy AI engines and models to Kubernetes clusters, including features such as federated training and advanced model observability.

VMware by Broadcom

Hock Tan

CEO

VMware by Broadcom has a wide range of AI offerings—from AI-optimized infrastructure on VMware to Broadcom’s networking chips that are critical for AI computing. VMware recently launched Private AI to drive GenAI initiatives and business gains from AI, while VMware AI Labs works to create platforms for AI services that ensure privacy and control.