A leading Nordic data center services company offering environmentally responsible, power-efficient and cost-optimized hosting facilities and high-performance computing services.
THE OPPORTUNITY
“The Neu.ro AI Cloud was created for enterprise AI teams who are dedicated to both high-impact AI solutions and the responsibility we all share for ethical and sustainable AI. Our green cloud is a zero-emission path forward for increasingly large models and datasets.”– Neu.ro CEO Constantine Goltsev
“Neu.ro’s state-of-the-art MLOps platform helps to solve some of the most complex challenges that enterprises and scientists face today, and atNorth is thrilled to be a part of delivering that innovation at zero carbon cost.”– Sebastian Holtslag, Vice President International at atNorth
“Our high density data centers across the Nordics are built with sustainability, scalability and security at their forefront, and we look forward to supporting Neu.ro’s future growth.”– Vyacheslav Nikolaev, President & CEO
The cloud revolution is in full force, and AI is a major emerging driver of new cloud adoption. IDC estimates that fast-growing AI workloads will account for up to 50% of the total cloud market by 2025. Gartner estimates that 70% of enterprise will use cloud-based AI infrastructure to operationalize AI by 2024. By 2025, 50% of enterprise will use AI orchestration platforms to operationalize AI, up from <10% in 2020. This is set to produce a 10x increase in demand for AI compute, and is leading AI to become the #1 driver of infrastructure decisions in enterprise technology.
The standard corporate playbook for addressing environmental and climate change concerns is to purchase carbon offsets as a way of achieving “net zero” emissions in line with climate accords and local regulations. But verifying the credibility of carbon offsets is extremely difficult, as emissions reductions must be found to be real, permanent, and that they would not have occurred without the offset.
Furthermore, there are real concerns that offsets represent a moral hazard by allowing polluters a way around cutting their own emissions as fast as possible and that they are a way of shifting the burden of fighting climate change from wealthy nations to poor nations.
The Challenge
AI has the potential to solve some of the most important problems in the world today, including finding cures for major diseases, making supply chains more robust and adaptable, reducing energy consumption and increasing agricultural efficiency. But these grand challenges require ever larger data sets and investments in compute. We are already seeing results, however. The latest developments in large language models by Microsoft, Open AI, and others are creating human-like speech and text that was unthinkable a few short years ago. NVIDIA’s omniverse-driven digital Earth twin is producing the most detailed modeling of global weather that has ever existed. And according to AI scientist Gary Marcus, 2022 is when we will likely see the first medicine hit the market for which AI played a substantial role in the discovery process (link)
But this progress comes at a very real cost to the environment. Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) already account for an estimated 9% of total global electricity use. The European Commission estimates that this percentage could more than double by 2030 to up to 20% of total consumption.
AI’s portion of electricity consumption is growing much higher than other technologies. Deep Learning models and the data sets they train upon are growing at a truly extraordinary rate. In less than 5 years, the leading language model will have increased in size by over 100,000x.
- Complete MLOps stack with best in breed tool sets
- Complete ML pipelines
- White glove support
- 100% powered by geothermal & hydro generation
The Solution
In order to facilitate AI workload growth and satisfy atNorth’s current and future AI needs, Neu.ro proposed to install an oem cloud AI orchestration and interoperability solution to reside natively on atNorth’s zero emissions cloud service.
The unique advantages of the platform are easy and fast access to the computing infrastructure from a CLI or menu system, access control and permissions for authorized team members, orchestration of both cloud and on-prem compute resources, automation of workflows and protection of AI assets and artifacts at all stages of the ML lifecycle.
In addition to this, the platform also integrates a wide selection of best-in-breed AI/ML toolsets covering the entire ML life cycle.
Following an accelerated timeline, Neu.ro successfully installed, tested and launched turnkey AI/ML services for atNorth, allowing them to leverage their existing corporate client base by offering a compelling alternative to AWS Sagemaker and offering ease and flexibility for creating, training, testing and deploying models
Additional functionality permitting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures and a selection of ready and pre-integrated AI/ML products, apps and APIs for use – covering both open source and proprietary options – provide users with advantages in terms of reduced cost, time, difficulty and risk for AI development projects.
Additional features:
- Integrated toolset to manage the environmental impact of your AI program
- Monitor the CO2 footprint of every job, model, project, team
- Optimize compute usage to balance performance / environmental impact
- Automate reporting for ESG disclosures soon to be mandated by the EU
- ESG reporting is a requirement for enterprise
- Neu.ro provides Automated reporting and tools for CO2 reduction