Nvidia and Italian startup iGenius said Thursday that they intend to bring one of the largest deployments of Nvidia’s newest servers online in a data center in southern Italy by the middle of next year.
About 80 of Nvidia’s most potent servers, known as GB200 NVL72 workstations, with 72 of the tech giant’s “Blackwell” chips in each, will be housed in a data center that iGenius is constructing.
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.
Nvidia’s entire suite of software tools, including Nvidia NIM, which was unveiled this year and serves as a sort of app store for AI models, has also been utilized by iGenius for Colosseum. According to one measure of AI sophistication, some of the AI models that iGenius plans to create using Colosseum might have up to 1 trillion parameters. This means that any company that employs Nvidia chips could readily use them.
“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.
“They’re really building something unique here.”