IBM deal brings AMD Instinct accelerators to IBM Cloud

Existing support for Nvidia and Intel chips

The AMD partnership is just the latest effort by IBM to expand its AI accelerator options for cloud users.

In October, it announced that IBM Cloud users could access Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU instances in virtual private cloud and managed Red Hat OpenShift environments. The H100 Tensor Core GPUs were added to a family of Nvidia GPUs and software that IBM already supported. At the time, IBM said the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU could enable up to 30X faster inference performance over the A100 Tensor Core.

In August, IBM and Intel said they would deploy Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators as a service on IBM Cloud. Gaudi 3, integrated with 5th Gen Xeon, supports enterprise AI workloads in the cloud and in data centers, providing customers with visibility and control over their software stack, simplifying workload and application management, Intel stated. The Intel Gaudi 3 offering, which is expected to be available in early 2025, is aimed at helping IBM Cloud users to more cost effectively scale enterprise AI application development.