Rackspace Technology and AMD sign partnership for enterprise AI infrastructure
Rackspace Technology (NASDAQ: RXT) and AMD announced they signed a memorandum of understanding to develop enterprise AI infrastructure for regulated industries. The multiyear strategic partnership aims to create what the companies call an Enterprise AI Cloud for organizations requiring security, governance, and accountability.
The collaboration plans to integrate AMD Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs into a managed infrastructure stack. Under the proposed model, Rackspace would operate the complete technology stack from hardware to applications, contrasting with current approaches where enterprises rent GPU capacity hourly and manage operations themselves.
The partnership proposes four service offerings: Enterprise AI Cloud, which would provide a fully managed private AI environment; Enterprise Inference Engine, a context-aware runtime system; Inference as a Service, offering managed AMD Instinct GPUs with development tools; and Bare Metal AMD Instinct, providing dedicated hardware access for specialized workloads.
"As enterprises move AI out of the lab and into production environments, they're asking who they can trust to run it there," said Gajen Kandiah, CEO of Rackspace Technology. "Governing AI infrastructure in regulated environments with defined accountability is not something you bolt on after the fact."
Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager of Compute & Enterprise AI at AMD, stated that the collaboration delivers AMD AI compute into managed, private environments for enterprise AI deployment.
The memorandum represents a framework for potential collaboration and does not constitute binding commitments from either company. The companies noted that no definitive agreements have been reached and discussions remain preliminary.
