CHENNAI: U.S.-based cloud infrastructure provider Vultr on Monday announced the launch of a 20-megawatt (MW) artificial intelligence (AI) supercluster in Chennai, powered by AMD Instinct MI355X graphics processing units (GPUs), marking its largest such deployment in India.
The facility, expected to house around 10,000 GPUs in its initial configuration, will be among Vultr’s two largest AMD AI infrastructure deployments globally, alongside its Springfield facility in Ohio.
Designed to support large language model and foundation model training, fine-tuning and high-throughput inference, it will cater to AI labs, startups, enterprises, research institutions and universities. It will use AMD’s ROCm open software ecosystem.
Vultr plans to expand capacity in 2027 with AMD’s MI455X GPUs and Helios rack-scale AI architecture. The company is targeting 600 MW of AI infrastructure capacity in India by 2028 and gigawatt scale by 2029, although it has not committed to firm timelines.
“I would be disappointed if we don’t have 600 megawatt live by 2028, and then get into gigawatt by 2029,” said Amit Rai, General Manager – AI and Enterprise Cloud at Vultr.
Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Cochrane said the company’s expansion plans over the next two to three years would be an “order of magnitude greater” than its current deployment.
He said global enterprises had already pre-reserved a substantial portion of the Chennai facility’s capacity, without disclosing identities or quantum booked.
“We do have some global enterprises that have pre-reserved a lot of the capacity that won’t be sold through to digital startups and made available to universities here,” he said.
Vultr did not disclose investment in the Chennai project or its existing data centre operations in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru. The company has more than 10,000 active customers in India.
On power availability, Cochrane said the Tamil Nadu government had enabled 150 MW of connected power at the location, of which 20 MW was available for initial deployment.”The 20 megawatts is available to electrify and light up our racks so that they can start producing value on day one,” he said.
The company did not disclose cooling technology or projected water consumption. It said it was working with partners, including real estate developers and data centre operators, and collaborating with server supplier Supermicro on energy-efficient racks.
Vultr has hired more than 100 people in India over the past three months and plans thousands of additional hires in network engineering and operations by March. Its Chennai workforce could eventually reach 5,000.
