Artificial intelligence (AI) cloud provider Nebul has selected Lightbits Labs for the storage foundation for its AI cloud.

Nebul's cloud enables companies within the EU to deploy Nvidia-based private AI in the cloud.

The cloud provider knew that its customers would require block storage for the latency-sensitive workloads associated with AI, and selected the Lightbits cloud data platform to provide this.

"We considered the usual storage providers, but even the software-defined ones tend to have a ‘closed recipe’ now in terms of infrastructure. We prefer to build with software that’s open, innovative, and especially performant," said Arnold Juffer, CEO and founder of Nebul. "With Lightbits as part of our platform, we can offer our customers 16 times the performance at half the cost of AI services from the hyperscalers."

The Lightbits platform can reportedly scale beyond the petabyte level and deliver a performance of up to 75 million IOPs (input/output operations per second) with a consistent sub-millisecond tail latency.

"With Lightbits in place, Nebul can now provide EU-based organizations with a specialty AI cloud that runs on Nvidia AI Enterprise with certified tools, frameworks, and AI apps to meet the demands of today’s most intensive applications," said Eran Kirzner, CEO and co-founder of Lightbits. "The data platform is incredibly flexible running in container environments, like Kubernetes and Azure Kubernetes Solution (AKS), delivering accelerated performance and efficiency for cloud-native applications at scale. We attribute this versatility combined with the unparalleled speed, scalability, and cost-efficiency to the increase in interest and cloud service use cases, like AI."

Lightbits Labs invented the NVMe over TCP protocol. The company is backed by the likes of Cisco Investments, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, Lenovo, and Micron.

Several AI-focused clouds have emerged since the AI boom.

CoreWeave, a GPU cloud provider that pivoted away from crypto, raised $7.5 billion in debt financing earlier this year. Earlier this month, another GPU cloud provider, Lambda Labs, was seeking $800m in funding.

Other companies targeting AI clouds include Civo and Nscale, both of which launched this year