CoreWeave partners with Dell Technologies to ‘empower enterprises to harness AI’

“By shipping the first fully integrated, liquid-cooled Dell IR7000 racks with Nvidia GB200 NVL72, we’ve equipped CoreWeave’s enterprise customers with the speed and scalability to accelerate AI-driven projects,” says Dell vice chairman and COO Jeff Clarke

Dell Technologies liquid-cooled servers and racks will now form the backbone of hot AI hyperscaler CoreWeave’s expanded cloud service offerings after the two companies Monday unveiled the signing of a strategic partnership.

The companies said the deal was needed to meet the demand for high-performance cloud environments.

The hardware in the deal includes Dell’s liquid-cooled PowerEdge XE9712 servers that connect up to 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in a rack-scale.

“AI has boundless potential, and Dell is at the epicenter of this revolution,” Dell Technologies vice chairman and COO Jeff Clarke wrote in a statement that accompanied the announcement.

“By shipping the first fully integrated, liquid-cooled Dell IR7000 racks with Nvidia GB200 NVL72, we’ve equipped CoreWeave’s enterprise customers with the speed and scalability to accelerate AI-driven projects.

“Together, Dell and CoreWeave will empower enterprises to harness AI.”

Dell founder, chairman and CEO Michael Dell said in November that the Round Rock, Texas-based company was "the first in the world” to ship the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 to a customer, which was CoreWeave.

“We are thrilled to deliver our liquid-cooled PowerEdge XE9712 to CoreWeave,” Dell wrote.

“The AI and HPC rocket just got a massive boost!”

Leveraging NVLink, the 72 GPUs can work as one to deliver 25 times the efficiency of the H100 and runs trillion-parameter LLM inferencing 30 times faster.

Those devices will be housed inside Dell’s IR7000, a 21-inch-wide water-cooled integrated rack that is able to capture nearly 100 per cent of the heat that is created in keeping the system running.

“We are dedicated to pushing the boundaries of AI development," said Brian Venturo, co-founder and chief strategy officer at CoreWeave.

"Dell Technologies is a strategic partner when it comes to delivering world-class performance at scale, bringing cutting-edge cloud services to market and helping our customers build the next generation of AI applications.”

Dell’s AI infrastructure will be integrated with CoreWeave’s managed software cloud services, which includes CoreWeave Kubernetes Service and SUNK, a Slurm-on-Kubernetes integration, according to Venturo.

The platforms provide a combination of high performance, ease of use, security and flexibility, CoreWeave said.

Those features, coupled with CoreWeave’s mission control capabilities, ensure customers can access large-scale Nvidia accelerated computing and system performance.

During its third-quarter earnings call last month, Dell said it shipped $2.9bn (£2.27bn) in AI servers, resulting in an AI server backlog of $4.5bn.

Meanwhile Dell’s five-quarter pipeline grew more than 50 per cent sequentially, with growth across all customer types.

CoreWeave’s Venturo recently said the company will be the among the first to market with Nvida’s Blackwell GPUs in order to meet what he said was “insatiable demand” for its infrastructure and cloud services.

The Dell-based CoreWeave “cluster delivers up to 1.4 exaFLOPS of AI compute power per rack - enabling up to four times faster training and 30 times faster real-time inference of trillion-parameter models compared with previous-generation GPUs.

The architecture includes 13.5 TB of high-bandwidth, NVLink-connected GPU memory per rack, optimised for massive datasets, and liquid cooling that reduces energy consumption and costs,” according to CoreWeave.

Just last month, New Jersey-based CoreWeave confirmed it had closed a $650m secondary share sale, which included buy-ins from networking giant Cisco Systems, storage heavyweight Pure Storage and investment firms BlackRock, Coatue and Fidelity.

That was after it had secured $7.5bn in debt financing led by Blackstone and Magnetar earlier this year.

CoreWeave was valued at $19bn in May according to reports in the The Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

CoreWeave, named to CRN’s 2023 list of the 10 Hottest Cloud Computing Startups, has been investing millions in expanding its datacentre footprint.

This article originally appeared on CRN UK sister website CRN.