Dell provides $150M to develop an AI compute cluster for Imbue

“The purpose of technology is to drive human progress, and this often begins at the research level,” Jeff Boudreau, chief AI officer at Dell said in a press statement. “Dell technology will provide Imbue with the powerful engine to help unearth the next generation of impactful AI innovation.”

Maintaining independence

The decision to go with Dell rather than use a cloud computing platform from Microsoft, Google, or Amazon to develop its AI models sets Imbue apart from other AI research startups.

Developing AI models consumes a significant amount of computing power, and it’s no small task to build and manage server clusters that can do this type of heavy lifting. Imbue’s system is managed by Voltage Park, a cloud computing provider that builds solutions for machine learning.

Josh Albrecht, Imbue’s CTO, said in comments published in a report online that the company didn’t want to be locked into a technology provider, which would have happened had they gone with a cloud service provider like Google or Amazon. “This allows us to remain independent,” he said.

Dell also helped the company deploy a custom cluster “much more quickly than other providers could have,” Albrecht said in a press statement.

Imbue and Dell designed the system to include smaller clusters, which supports rapid experimentation on novel model architectures, the companies said. It also supports rapid networking into a large cluster, which will enable the startup to efficiently train large-scale foundation models, they said.