NexGen Cloud and AQ Compute are planning a net zero "AI Supercloud" that will be hosted in the latter's data center in Oslo, Norway.
NexGen, a GPU cloud and Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, first announced plans for the supercloud in October 2023, claiming at the time to be investing $1 billion in the project.
In addition to this announcement, AQ Compute is officially inaugurating its facility, with NexGen as the first customer.
According to the company, by June the supercloud will be comprised of 20,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs. This will make the cloud equivalent in size to one of AWS' UltraScale clusters, each of which also has 20,000 H100 GPUs. In October last year, the company claimed to already have $576m in hardware orders secured for the project.
The AI cloud will be housed in AQ Compute's inaugural data center in Oslo, Norway, which is now live. The site uses renewable energy to power and cool its hardware and it is hoped by NexGen that this will ultimately enable the AI cloud offering to be net-zero. NexGen is the first tenant of the site and is taking up 6MW of capacity. This can be extended to 14MW.
The supercloud will be accessible via NexGen Cloud's hyperstack platform.
"The AI market is expected to grow exponentially over the next 12-24 months and as such it is imperative to decarbonize as much of the data generated as possible,” said Chris Starkey, CEO, NexGen Cloud. “By housing the data created within our AI Supercloud in AQ Compute data centers, we are not just innovating technologically, we are pioneering a sustainable shift in the way AI data is processed. We are not only the first to be doing this in Europe but hope to set the industry standard at the same time.”
AQ Compute currently has two data centers listed on its website, in Spain and Norway. AQ-OSL1 in Olso has 50MW of capacity and can accommodate 35kW per rack with liquid cooling. In addition, the site's cooling system includes heat capture through RDHX and direct liquid cooling, increasing the temperature the data center can run at and reducing cooling costs and water consumption. AQ Compute's other data center currently under development, AQ-BCN1 in Barcelona, also offers 50MW of IT capacity, though only states an availability of "liquid cooling for high-density racks," with no further details shared as yet.
In October 2023, AQ Compute announced it was selling off air-cooling units from its Oslo facility and was looking to hire plumbers for the site in order to switch to liquid cooling. All racks in the facility will have rear-door cooling attached to a water circulation loop under the floor. Any other cooling requirements can be delivered by free cooling using the outside air.
AQ Compute was launched in 2020 and is a subsidiary of Aquila Capital, a German investment group specializing in renewable energy.
NexGen Cloud was incorporated in 2020. Funding for the AI Supercloud project is being sourced via a specialized fund created with Moore and Moore Investments Group (MMI). According to NexGen, this fund has garnered investments from private investors.
