AI cloud services startup DarkByte has announced a partnership with IT giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to offer customers access to an on-demand AI cloud service powered by renewable energy, using sources including solar, batteries, hydro, and nanotech.
This, the company said, will help define new industry standards in environmental sustainability.
“We are proud to deliver energy efficiency to the data center industry alongside advanced heat capture solutions to drive industrial scale agriculture, anchored in enhanced community development,” said Akbar Shamji, chief executive officer of DarkByte.
The company said that the service will target government agencies and organizations responsible for driving mission-critical initiatives such as energy, healthcare, manufacturing, and financial services.
This partnership comes as energy needs of AI workloads are sounding alarm bells and organizations are struggling to balance sustainability and AI innovation.
Gartner highlighted the need to balance the benefits and advancements that come from AI against the environmental consequences that come from energy consumption by hardware, model training and inference.
Another report from data storage vendor Pure Storage “revealed the importance of reassessing data infrastructure to truly reap the benefits of AI, keep energy costs in line and stay on track with corporate environmental goals”.
“DarkByte shares our vision in making powerful AI accessible to more organizations while minimizing environmental impact,” said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC, AI & Labs, at HPE. “We look forward to working together to make our industry-leading supercomputing and machine learning software, purpose-built to support AI training at-scale, available to customers as a cloud service.”
DarkByte said that it will leverage HPE Cray XD supercomputers featuring NVIDIA H100, which are designed to support compute-intensive workloads such as AI, machine learning, modeling and simulation workloads.
Additionally, DarkByte’s AI cloud service will include the following:
- HPE’s AI/ML software to support training needs
- HPE Machine Learning Development Environment to rapidly train large-scale models
- HPE Machine Learning Data Management Software to integrate, track, and audit data with reproducible AI capabilities to generate trustworthy and accurate models.
HPE has also been working to democratize access to AI infrastructure, as it recently announced plans to sell the building blocks of a supercomputer designed for AI training to organizations that cannot afford the traditional infrastructure.
