ST Telemedia Global Data Centres and Firmus Technologies Forge Partnership to Build a Global Network of Sustainable AI Factories

Collaborative venture aims to provide cost-effective, large-scale and sustainable GPU and AI cloud services for the AI & visual computing era

Singapore, 22 June 2023 – ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC), a leading Singapore-based data centre provider, has announced a significant investment into a global venture with Firmus Technologies (Firmus), a leader in highly scaled immersion cooled computing platforms.

The venture is to be based in Singapore and will see the launch of a GPU-centric Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering focused on deep learning AI and visual computing workloads, to be known as Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC). SMC will deliver bare-metal-service access to high-performance AI clusters, which include some of the world’s most advanced workload accelerators including GPUs and high-speed networking from NVIDIA for energy-efficient computing.

SMC will leverage Firmus’ proprietary, scaled, immersion-cooled platform – the ‘HyperCube’ – hosted within global STT GDC locations, to deliver Sustainable AI Factories that are all at once sustainable, scalable, high performance and cost effective^[1].

Within the HyperCube, Firmus will operate a fleet of high-performance servers in its immersion-cooled environment, provided by OEM partners including Supermicro. Firmus’ unlocks access to world-class AI tools and hardware in a highly available way, thanks to industry-standard uptime SLAs, provided and warranted directly by SMC to each customer.

Firmus & STT GDC are launching SMC in Singapore, India and Australia in 2023, with the Singapore AZ (SIN01) expected to be live in H2 2023.

The combination of Firmus’ immersion-cooled computing platform, paired with STT GDC’s highly efficient data centre infrastructure, will result in AI workloads running with a lower PUE^[2], lower CO2 emissions and higher petaflops^[3] per watt.

“We are delighted to have STT GDC as our partner.  This venture is a world first and brings together Firmus’ world-class scaled immersion-cooled computing platform with STT GDC’s global footprint, based on NVIDIA’s deep learning and visual computing architecture that is driving the exponential growth in AI. This offering will be underpinned by STT GDC’s globally recognised and award-winning data centres,” said Ted Pretty, Firmus Technologies Chairman. “The vision of Firmus’ founders was to invest in a long-term solution that will break the mould of the traditional data centre model. They imagined the data centre as an entire computing platform – a ‘Sustainable AI Factory’ – and ensuring that this computing platform is best-in-class in terms of sustainability, operating and capital cost effectiveness. The vision of this venture is to combine STT GDC’s strength – being one of the world’s largest data centre infrastructure groups – with that of our HyperCube platform to deliver what we believe is a wholly unique proposition in delivering AI & visual computing at scale not seen before in Asia or Europe.”

“The compound growth in forecasted energy consumption is an existential threat to the data centre sector. Data centre operators and their customers must be prepared to embrace and support new cooling solutions and expand the services they offer beyond traditional air-cooled colocation if they are to host AI GPU platforms in a sustainable manner. The evolution of the data centre into AI factories of the future will fundamentally change the way that all infrastructure operators are thinking about the design and operation of their facilities. STT GDC’s foresight and long-term vision made them the ideal global partner for Firmus’ highly developed solution,” said Pretty.

“The future of data centres will rely on the ability to provide both exceptional performance and highly sustainable services at scale.  From our beginnings in Singapore almost 10 years ago, we now have scaled the business to cover 10 geographies. We are immensely pleased to enhance our core co-location offering to include the latest GPU-based bare-metal services, empowering our customers with access to the next generation of high-performance computing which will be so critical in the AI revolution.  These high-performance services are a key component of the critical infrastructure needed to support the plethora of AI use cases that will be critical to business, governments and society in years to come,” said Bruno Lopez, President and Group Chief Executive, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.

He continued, “STT GDC, in partnership with Firmus, is committed to providing sustainable and foundational compute infrastructure. Singapore was the location of choice for our first flagship installation given the city’s leadership in AI and sustainability.  Through our new bare-metal service, customers will have early access to cost-effective and large-scale GPU compute through Firmus' embedded AI compute platform with leading-edge liquid immersion technology. We believe that data centres are critical building blocks of computing, and our investment in Firmus' technology and computing platform will transform our assets into sustainable AI factories, enabling our customers to process demanding workloads efficiently.”

After the first deployment in Singapore, the subsequent expansion will be into the India market in 2023. In 2024 and beyond, the deployment of Sustainable Metal Cloud availability zones (AZs) will be expanded across the STT GDC portfolio.

^[1] The HyperCube platform does not make use of any per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAs)

^[2] PUE stands for power usage effectiveness. It is a metric used to measure the energy efficiency of a data centre facility. PUE is calculated by dividing the total amount of energy consumed by the data centre (including IT equipment and supporting infrastructure) by the energy consumed solely by the IT equipment. The lower the PUE value, the more energy-efficient the data centre is considered to be.

^[3] A petaflop is a unit of computing speed representing one quadrillion floating-point operations per second, commonly used to measure the processing power of supercomputers and high-performance computing systems.

About Firmus Technologies

Firmus Technologies was founded by a young and entrepreneurial Australian team supported by leading local investment funds. Its research facility was established in Australia, where access to renewable-based energy assisted in the development and commercialisation of its scaled immersion cooled computing platform.

From this facility Firmus developed the highly scalable system of multiple modularised 1MW HyperCubes that will now be deployed within STT GDC’s data centre locations for cloud AZs, or at edge locations that enable high performance AI to exist anywhere the workload is needed.

Stand-alone, the HyperCube technology operates within a sub 1.05 PUE envelope, and thanks to its advanced cooling features, extracts up to 30% further efficiency from the compute itself. By Total Usage Effectiveness (TUE) – a modern data centre metric that measures both facility and compute efficiency – HyperCube is amongst the most efficient compute platform in the world, with an engineered and expected TUE of less than 1.15 in Singapore.

For more information, visit https://firmus.co/ or https://smc.co/

About ST Telemedia Global Data Centres

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) is one of the fastest-growing data centre providers with a global platform serving as a cornerstone of the digital ecosystem that helps the world to connect. Powering a sustainable digital future, STT GDC operates across Singapore, the UK, Germany, India, Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines, providing businesses an exceptional foundation that is built for their growth anywhere. For more information, visit https://www.sttelemediagdc.com/

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