Graphics cards have become a massive business globally, with American company Nvidia at the forefront, valued at US$3.5 trillion. Initially designed for accelerating video games and image work, graphics processing units (GPUs) are now in high demand due to their unique ability to handle parallel operations, making them essential for artificial intelligence (AI).
Nvidia’s GPUs excel in AI tasks because they can process vast amounts of data simultaneously, unlike central processing units (CPUs), which are optimized for sequential processing. This parallelism is crucial for AI applications, allowing GPUs to complete complex computations much faster.
ASI Solutions, a local IT services provider, has partnered with VAST Data to create a secure and scalable GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offering for New Zealand businesses. The company’s country manager, Lloyd Vickery, explained that having thousands of smaller cores optimized for parallel workloads makes GPUs particularly effective for concurrent computations.
The target market for ASI’s GPUaaS is researchers, universities, government agencies, and organizations with data sovereignty requirements. The service is hosted in 100% renewable energy-certified data centers and offers a cloud-based platform to scale up or down as needed.
Recent developments include the South Korean government’s plan to buy 10,000 GPUs for its national AI data center and Meta’s order of 350,000 high-end Nvidia H100 cards. However, ASI is not finding supply chain issues with GPUs at this scale, and the company is focusing on leveraging existing investments from major companies to create value in New Zealand.
In summary, Nvidia’s GPUs are playing a crucial role in the AI boom, and local businesses like ASI Solutions are capitalizing on this trend by offering cloud-based GPUaaS services.
Source: https://www.interest.co.nz/technology/131995/hottest-ticket-it-graphics-cards-ai-asi-solutions-launching-gpuaas-nz