AI and HPC company Northern Data is teaming up with Gcore on a Intelligence Delivery Network (IDN) offering.
The IDN will comprise Gcore's 180 points of presence, more than 200 Tbps of network capacity, 14,000 peering partners, and is designed for low-latency Edge AI workloads.
The IDN will combine Northern Data's infrastructure with Gcore's Everywhere inference software and networking architecture and is hoped to offer customers with on-demand and simple-to-deploy architecture for AI workloads.
As part of the partnership, Northern Data Group has taken two seats on Gcore's Board of Directors.
Aroosh Thillainathan, founder and CEO of Northern Data Group, said: “We are combining Northern Data’s heritage of HPC and Data Center infrastructure expertise with Gcore’s software innovation and engineering expertise, allowing us to accelerate our vision of delivering software-enabled AI infrastructure across a globally distributed compute network. This is an inflection point where the use of AI solutions is evolving rapidly and we believe that this partnership will form a key part of the next phase of AI adoption.”
Andre Reitenbach, CEO of Gcore, added: “Partnering with Northern Data will provide Gcore and our enterprise customers access to one of the largest liquid-cooled GPU clusters and significant data center capacity worldwide. This collaboration supports Gcore’s mission to connect the world to AI anywhere and anytime with low latency, leveraging cutting-edge infrastructure to power the next generation of AI-driven applications.”
Northern Data Group was initially founded as Northern Bitcoin AG in Germany in 2009 and branded itself as a 'green' Bitcoin mining company. In 2019, it merged with Whinstone US, with Thillainathan becoming CEO of the joint company. In 2020, Northern Bitcoin was officially renamed Northern Data Group and moved its focus to HPC.
In the summer of 2023, Northern Data Group split its business into three brands: Taiga Cloud, Ardent Data Centers, and Peak Mining. In October 2024 the company said it was looking to divest Peak Mining and focus on AI and HPC.
Ardant operates data centers in Boden, Sweden; and Lefdal and Kristiansand, Norway. The Lefdal site is hosted by Lefdal Mine, and Kristiansand by Bulk. It has acquired and is upgrading a data center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In December 2024, Northern Data announced plans to develop a 120MW HPC data center in Maysville, Georgia.
Gcore is a Luxembourg-based Edge AI and cloud provider. In July 2024, the company raised $60 million in a Series A funding round. 2024 also saw Gcore launch a severless Edge solution called FastEdge, expand into South Korea with NHN Cloud for a GPU cluster, and deploy GPUs at Telia's Helsinki data center. In November 2024, the company signed an MoU with Qareeb Data Centres for AI and cloud services in the Middle East.
The company also has AI clusters located in Luxembourg and Wales, both deployed in 2023.
