Intel’s cloud gives developers access to thousands of the latest Intel Gaudi AI accelerator and Xeon CPU chips, combined to create a supercomputer optimized for AI workloads, Intel says. It is built on open software, including Intel’s oneAPI, to support the benchmarking of large-scale AI deployments.

After it began evaluating cloud providers in December, Seekr ran a series of benchmarking tests before committing to the Intel Developer Cloud and found it resulted in 20% faster AI training and 50% faster AI inference than the metrics the company could achieve on premises with current-generation hardware.  

“Ultimately for us, it comes down to, ‘Are we getting the latest-generation AI compute, and are we getting it at the right price?’” Clark says. “Building [AI] foundation models at multibillion-parameters scale takes a large amount of compute.”

Intel’s Gaudi 2 AI accelerator chip has previously received high marks for performance. The Gaudi 2 chip, developed by the Intel acquired Habana Labs, outperformed Nvidia’s A100 80GB GPU in tests run in late 2022 by AI company Hugging Face.

Seekr’s collaboration with Intel isn’t all about performance, however, says Clark. While Seekr needs cutting-edge AI hardware for some workloads, the cloud model also enables the company to limit its use to just the computing power it needs in the moment, he notes.

“The goal here is not to use the extensive AI compute all of the time,” he says. “Training a large foundation model versus inferencing on a smaller, distilled model take different types of compute.”