Singaporean cloud company Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC) is expanding globally.
First reported by Reuters, the start-up is seeking new opportunities, with CEO and co-founder Tim Rosenfield stating on July 25: "Due to client demand, we’re looking to expand in EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa) and North America."
SMC, a partner of Nvidia, operates "sustainable AI factories" (data centers) in Singapore and Australia. The company has other sites set to launch in India and Thailand.
Thus far, SMC has 1,200 Nvidia H100s deployed in Singapore which are used for open-source models. It aims to increase this to 5,000 by the end of the year.
The company uses immersion cooling in its "AI factories," and claims that this reduces its energy consumption by up to 50 percent compared to air cooling.
Bloomberg reports that, according to a source with "direct knowledge of the matter," SMC is currently raising $400 million in equity and $550m in debt.
The details surrounding the fundraising are subject to change, though the money will be dedicated to the company's data center expansion beyond Singapore.
In addition to being a partner of Nvidia, SMC is the result of a joint partnership between ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) group and immersion cooling specialist Firmus. The two launched the SMC bare-metal cloud service for AI and visual computing in STT GDC's data centers. According to that release, SMC deploys its solution in 1MW shipping container-based data centers known as "hypercubes."
