A fledgling startup is getting down to develop into considered one of Europe’s first “AI compute” hyperscalers, with renewable power taking part in a pivotal half in its pitch to potential clients.
The AI goldrush has spurred unprecedented demand for “compute,” which refers back to the processing energy, infrastructure and sources wanted for duties equivalent to working algorithms, executing machine studying fashions, and processing information. One of many large beneficiaries of this demand has been Nvidia, rising as a $3 trillion powerhouse off the again of demand for its GPU (graphics processing models) and related AI {hardware}.
In tandem, an trade of cloud infrastructure suppliers has sprung up off the again of Nvidia, elevating bucket a great deal of money en route. Within the U.S., we’ve seen the likes of Lambda and CoreWeave hit lofty billion-dollar valuations to increase their datacenter operations. Now, Finnish startup DataCrunch is throwing its hat into the ring, touting itself as one of many “few serious players” within the area with all operations in Europe.
‘GPU-as-a-service’
Based in 2020 by CEO Ruben Bryon, DataCrunch — like its friends — sells GPUs “as-a-service,” promising to cut back the prices for AI processing. The corporate right now mentioned it has raised $13 million in seed funding, constituting $7.6 million in fairness financing from backers equivalent to ByFounders, J12 Ventures, and Aiven co-founder Oskari Saarenmaa. The remaining $5.4 million debt phase hails from Native Tapiola and Nordea.
Whereas it’s barely uncommon for a seed-stage startup to lift such a good portion as debt, DataCrunch has accomplished this for the very same purpose that others within the area, equivalent to CoreWeave, have additionally been elevating hefty quantities of debt. It’s all about utilizing bodily property — e.g. Nvidia GPUs — as collateral to safe loans, somewhat than freely giving extra fairness.
It’s additionally extra environment friendly to safe giant buckets of capital this fashion, because the banks can merely take away the GPUs if issues go belly-up for DataCrunch. For many who management the purse strings, it’s a lot much less riskier than investing in a pure-play SaaS startup, for example.
“Given the business that we’re in, our main expenses for expansion are capex [capital expenditure] driven,” Bryon informed TechCrunch. “This is the logical way to go about it, and as we grow, additional access to that financing becomes available.”
This new spherical takes DataCrunch’s whole funding raised since inception to $18 million, and can go a way towards serving to it construct out its infrastructure to help Nvidia’s newest servers and clusters, together with the shiny new H200 GPU. In flip, this can assist it develop a buyer base that not solely contains company purchasers equivalent to Sony, however particular person AI researchers working on the likes of OpenAI.
“That has always been an important market for us, and I think that this ‘individual’ market has been left behind by many,” Bryon mentioned. “For me, personally, it’s important — at the weekend, I’m often using our own services, and have been since the beginning.”
Certainly, versatile, on-demand pricing is a much more alluring proposition for unbiased researchers and builders who would possibly simply want just a little little bit of compute for private or college initiatives.
“People who are studying for a Masters or a PhD — that’s a segment we want to stay connected to because it’s often people who are a few years away from doing something really great,” Bryon mentioned.
Hook them in now, and reap the rewards later after they hit the large time. That’s the overall gist.
However there’s no escaping the large elephant within the room, one that each one the cloud corporations are having to reckon with: the gargantuan quantity of power required to energy this AI revolution.
Inexperienced machine
A part of DataCrunch’s “advantage” is the truth that its information facilities are positioned within the Finnish capital, Helsinki, and Iceland — a rustic working on 100% renewable power for years already.
“In Helsinki, we can subscribe to green energy from the grid,” Bryon mentioned. “And currently, in one of our two Finnish data centers, the waste heat is captured to heat up Helsinki itself. In Iceland, we have the advantage that the ambient air temperature is always low, while the energy mix on the grid is already 100% green. So Iceland is pretty much one of the greenest places in the world to have these kinds of operations.”
This can be an enormous point of interest for the corporate shifting ahead. Whereas it plans to supply its companies to any firm globally, it should principally stay anchored within the Nordics and Iceland. “Perhaps in the future we’ll look at Canada if we can find suitable locations, where we can have a similar advantage in terms of carbon footprint of our operations,” Bryon mentioned.
It’s these “green” credentials that DataCrunch hopes will even set it aside from different European rivals: corporations like FlexAI in France, which not too long ago exited stealth with $30 million in seed funding; and Nebius, which not too long ago emerged from the ashes of Russian web big Yandex and has simply develop into a public firm once more.
There’s a trade-off right here, although: Whereas low latency is usually one of many large promoting factors for AI compute suppliers, DataCrunch isn’t essentially going to be in that bucket, which suggests it will likely be higher suited to a selected type of workload.
“Our strategy is such that we’re not going to be the provider with the absolute lowest latency due to being in 100 locations around the world,” Bryon mentioned. “We are more focused on the compute that doesn’t have that strict latency requirement. We can still have a decent enough latency though, it might not be 10 milliseconds, but it will still be something like 100 milliseconds.”
It’s additionally value noting that DataCrunch’s information facilities are in shared “co-location” services for now, however the firm says it’s planning to start out constructing out its personal information facilities in 2025 — one thing it should want considerably extra capital for.
“I want us to be on a path toward going public with this company, and we’ll need access to plenty more capital to keep expanding the company,” Bryon mentioned.
