Lambda Labs enabled on-demand availability of Nvidia H100 GPUs through its GPU cloud clusters.

Lambda will officially launch its 1-Click Clusters, which will give customers access to Nvidia H100 GPUs and Quantum 2 InfiniBand clusters on demand. Working with Nvidia, Lambda will provide clusters ranging from two to 64 nodes available on demand. These clusters let companies access only the computing power they need, especially if they don't need the GPUs to run 24/7.

According to Robert Brooks, Lambda's co-founder and vice president for revenue, the service addresses a critical challenge for companies building their own models. "Training is really computationally an engineering challenge from a hardware and software perspective," Brooks told VentureBeat. "If you start an AI company right now, you need to get a lot of money to get a large cluster of GPUs and it takes time to even begin spinning that up." Most companies opt to use off-the-shelf AI models that have already been pre-trained and fine-tune them with their own data and governance policies, primarily due to the cost associated with building and training foundation models.

Smaller companies working with AI end up either renting GPU space or working with cloud providers in hopes of gaining access to the processors needed to train their models. While cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure offer not just access to AI models but also Nvidia GPUs, Brooks noted that the focus in those instances is on inference — where the AI model is actually being deployed instead of learning — rather than training. Additionally, contracts to use GPU clusters often last a year or longer, which is prohibitive for companies that may only need them for a few months.

Lambda figured out a way to make the hardware, in particular the Nvidia H100 GPUs and InfiniBand networking used for large-scale research, ready for new model training projects on demand. The 1-Click clusters specifically target companies that only need to train models for a shorter period and who cannot afford to sign long-term contracts for GPUs they may not use beyond a few months. Companies can reserve the number of nodes they need on the Lambda cluster for a minimum of two weeks, with pricing that depends on the number of nodes and time period needed.

Lambda, founded in 2012, raised $320 million in February, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion.