Foundry has launched its GPU-based Foundry Cloud Platform for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
Following the company's emergence in March of this year with $80 million of funding, the AI cloud platform is now live.
The company claims that its cloud platform can reduce operational complexity and compute cost by up to six times.
The company seeks to overcome the GPU shortage by turning to existing GPUs that it claims are "vastly underutilized."
“The GPU compute market as it exists today is one of the most inefficient commodity markets in history, and it’s directly limiting critical AI innovations that will benefit society,” explains Jared Quincy Davis, founder and CEO of Foundry.
“The majority of AI research and development teams struggle to access affordable and reliable compute for their workloads, while exceptionally well-funded organizations are forced to purchase long-term GPU reservations that they rarely utilize to maximum capacity. Foundry Cloud Platform addresses this market failure by aggregating and redistributing idle compute capacity to enable faster breakthroughs while improving return on GPU investments.”
Foundry is offering access to its GPU capacity via resealable reserved instances in which AI teams can reserve short-term capacity from Foundry's virtual GPU machines, for periods as brief as three hours. Customers can also resell idle capacity from their reservations.
It can also be used via spot instances, which users can bid on for interrupt-tolerant workloads.
Additionally, Foundry offers Kubernetes workload orchestration, which eliminates manual scheduling by programmatically adding reserved and spot instances to a managed Kubernetes cluster.
Early adopters of the Foundry Cloud Platform include Infinite Monkey, an AI startup developing architectures for AGI, and Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization studying complex diseases, including cancer, neurodegeneration, and immune dysfunction.
“Foundry Cloud Platform has accelerated science at Arc,” said Patrick Hsu, co-founder and core investigator at Arc Institute. “Our machine learning work brings demanding performance infrastructure needs, and Foundry delivers. With Foundry, we can guarantee that our researchers have exactly the compute they need, when they need it, without procurement friction.”
Quincy Davis, formerly a research scientist at Google’s DeepMind deep learning team, started building Foundry in 2022 when he recognized the need for a cloud computing service provider that focused on AI workloads.
He told Fortune he was inspired by DeepMind's AlphaGo, an AI program that plays an ancient Chinese strategy game.
Earlier this month, another alumnus from the DeepMind team, Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft as the head of its consumer artificial intelligence business.
