IBM, Together AI ink $240 million multi-year agreement for AI cluster

IBM and Together AI will build a $240-million AI cluster using Nvidia's latest systems, reflecting rising demand for computing capacity to run open-source AI models

IBM and startup Together AI have signed a $240 million multi-year agreement to build a large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) cluster on IBM Cloud using Nvidia systems, the companies said on Tuesday. 

The cluster will provide inference for open-source AI models, which have gained traction as businesses seek to rein in AI costs and weigh concerns about cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. 

Inference, the process of running trained AI models to generate responses, has bec­ome one of the largest drivers of demand for computing capacity, prompting cloud providers and chipmakers to spend billions of dollars expanding AI infrastructure. 

 

The cluster on IBM Cloud will use Nvidia’s HGX B300 systems, which link the chipmaker’s newer Blackwell processors, and its Spectrum-X Ethernet networking gear. Nvidia has said the Blackwell chips are optimised for AI inference.