The Italian firm iGenius and Nvidia, which opened a new tab on Thursday, announced that they intend to bring one of the largest deployments of Nvidia’s newest servers online by the middle of next year in a data center located in southern Italy.
A data center being constructed by iGenius will have roughly 80 of Nvidia’s most potent servers, known as GB200 NVL72 machines, each of which contains 72 of the tech giant’s “Blackwell” chips.
The project’s price tag was not provided by the startup. However, CEO Uljan Sharka told Reuters that iGenius, one of the few AI startups in Europe with a valuation of over $1 billion, has raised 650 million euros this year and is raising more money for the “Colosseum” AI computer system.
In contrast to competitors like OpenAI, iGenius creates open source AI software models for chatbots that it sells to banks, healthcare organizations, and other sectors with stringent data security regulations. These businesses then operate the models on their own infrastructure.
iGenius has also utilized Nvidia’s entire suite of software tools for Colosseum, including Nvidia NIM, which was unveiled this year and serves as a sort of app store for AI models. This implies that any company that employs Nvidia chips may readily use the AI models that iGenius intends to create with Colosseum, some of which could have up to 1 trillion parameters based on one measure of AI sophistication.
“With a click of a button, they can now pull it from the Nvidia catalog and implement it into their application,” Sharka said.
Charlie Boyle, vice president and general manager of DGX systems at Nvidia, told Reuters that Colosseum will be one of the biggest installations of the company’s flagship servers worldwide.
According to him, iGenius is collaborating closely with several Nvidia hardware and software teams to get the system up.