Datacenter services outfit Northern Data Group will be the first cloud provider in Europe to offer the use of the recently launched powerful H200 GPU hardware from Nvidia.
Germany-headquartered Northern Data is made up of the Taiga Cloud, Ardent Data Centers, and Peak Mining business units. It will be Taiga Cloud that offers the GPUs in datacenters in the final quarter of this year, said Northern Data.
Northern Data Group is an Elite Partner of Nvidia. Taiga’s “energy-efficient” cloud is said to be powered by Europe’s largest cluster of Nvidia 100 Tensor Core and H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which helps organizations “accelerate AI and ML innovation on demand,” according to the company.
Taiga is deploying the new GPUs in partnership with Supermicro, and the move will help further build up Northern Data’s high-performance computing solutions, while complementing its existing GenAI technologies available to customers.
The first full island of over 2,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs will deliver 32 petaFLOPS of performance, it is promised. They will utilize BlueField-3 data processing units (DPUs) and Nvidia Mellanox CX7 NICs. The configuration of Nvidia-referenced architecture will allow customers to “access more bandwidth, and faster and more efficient data storage access,” said the provider.
The GPUs will be accommodated in one of Northern Data Group’s European datacenters, powered by “carbon-free, renewable energy,” and have a power usage effectiveness ratio of less than 1.2, it is promised.
“Our GenAI platform is constantly evolving and we are proud to collaborate with Supermicro to be the first in Europe to offer access to Nvidia H200 GPUs,” said Aroosh Thillainathan, founder and CEO, Northern Data Group. “This is testament to our commitment to continually offer industry-leading, next-generation solutions.”
“We are collaborating with Northern Data Group to expand its GenAI cloud offering to include Supermicro GPU servers based on the latest Nvidia H200 HGX GPUs,” added Vik Malyala, president and managing director, EMEA, and SVP of technology and AI at Supermicro.
“We are fully committed to delivering the most performant and energy-efficient AI infrastructure and solutions, and this collaboration will accelerate availability and bring the best value for customers in Europe.”
Last December, Ardent Data Centers revealed a €110 million ($119 million) investment to expand its ability to provide colocation services for HPC and AI compute power across both Europe and the US.
It signed Letters of Intent with two datacenter sites in the US, and was the preferred bidder on a strategic site in the UK. The assets will boost capacity to help address the surging demand for compute power needed for GenAI applications. The anchor tenant for the extra capacity will be sister company Taiga Cloud.
