Italian startup iGenius and Nvidia are building a massive AI system
Written by Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Italian startups iGenius and Nvidia said on Thursday they plan to bring online one of the world’s largest distributed locations of Nvidia servers by the middle of next year at a data center in southern Italy.
iGenius is building a data center that will include about 80 of Nvidia’s most powerful servers, called GB200 NVL72 machines, each with 72 chips from the tech company “Blackwell” in them.
The startup did not provide a price tag for the project. But Chief Executive Uljan Sharka told Reuters that iGenius, one of the few AI startups in Europe valued at more than $1 billion, has raised 650 million euros this year and is taking additional funding for a computer program -AI, which will be called. “Colosseum”.
iGenius differs from competitors such as OpenAI because it develops open source AI software models for chatbots that it sells to banks, healthcare firms and other industries with strict data security regulations, which use the models in their infrastructure.
At the Colosseum, iGenius also tapped into Nvidia’s full suite of software tools, including one introduced this year called Nvidia NIMS that acts almost like an app store for AI models. That means the AI models iGenius hopes to develop with Colosseum – some of which can be hundreds of millions of parameters in one measure of AI expertise – can be easily deployed in any business using Nvidia chips.
“With the click of a button, they can now pull it out of Nvidia’s catalog and use it in their application,” Shaka said.
The Colosseum will be one of the largest deployments of Nvidia’s flagship servers in the world, Charlie Boyle, vice president and general manager of DGX programs at Nvidia, told Reuters.
Many of Nvidia’s software and hardware teams are working directly with iGenius to bring the system online, he said.
“They’re definitely building something different here.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Tom Hogue)
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