Japan's Rakuten Group is set to deploy Ampere hardware across its data centers.
The company is expanding its partnership with Ampere Computing to reduce the power consumption of artificial intelligence (AI) computing.
Rakuten will be deploying Ampere Arm CPUs across its data centers following the successful trials which showed a reduction of energy use of 36 percent per rack and an 11 percent reduction in space required per rack for Rakuten Cloud's internal cloud container-based services.
Rakuten achieved carbon neutrality in 2023. At the time, the company revealed that it had also improved efficiency at its data centers by "adjusting server racks with panels to optimize cooling efficiency, we were able to reduce electricity consumption here significantly on an annual basis.”
With demand for AI growing, the company is making its data centers more energy-efficient to maintain this standard. Rakuten will be scaling out the use of Ampere-based hardware throughout 2025.
Hironori Yoshida, executive officer and vice director of the cloud platform supervisory department at Rakuten Group, said: “As demand for compute increases with the adoption of AI, cloud operators need to look into platforms and solutions to realize more sustainable compute. We have been very encouraged by the results of our trials with Ampere and look forward to continuing our collaboration to realize energy-efficient, sustainable data centers.”
Sean Varley, chief evangelist and VP of Business Development at Ampere, added: “Rakuten and Ampere are collaborating to deliver scale-out services for internal workloads to reduce power usage and increase performance. As AI becomes a volume application, we will look into delivering compelling, cost-effective solutions together.”
Rakuten is a Japanese technology conglomerate based in Tokyo and founded in 1997. The company's mobile unit was seeking a sale and leaseback of part of its network in August of this year.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Renée James and a group of her former Intel colleagues, Ampere designs chips specifically for servers based on the Arm architecture, which has grown in popularity among data center operators in recent years.
As well as working with Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, Ampere designs chips for the likes of Tencent and TikTok owner ByteDance.
Earlier this year, reports emerged that Ampere Computing was exploring a sale. Oracle is an investor in the company.
