Vultr and AMD back Cambridge University's TESSERA AI project

Vultr and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced support for the University of Cambridge's Energy & Environment Group in developing TESSERA, an AI foundation model designed to monitor environmental change at a planetary scale, according to a press release from Vultr.

Vultr is providing cloud GPU infrastructure powered by AMD Instinct MI325X accelerators to generate embeddings covering Earth's land surface from 2017 to 2025. The project processes data from European Space Agency Sentinel satellites to create compressed AI representations of every 10-meter square of Earth's surface.

The collaboration began in November 2025, with the first global embeddings made publicly available in early 2026 under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. The University's Energy & Environment Group also plans to release a fully reproducible pipeline for training the model from scratch on Vultr infrastructure.

The project targets three application areas: agriculture and crop health monitoring, biodiversity and habitat tracking, and mapping of renewable energy infrastructure such as solar installations and wind farms.

Professor Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing at Cambridge's Department of Computer Science & Technology, said: "Our goal is to democratize access to planetary-scale environmental monitoring. By making TESSERA's embeddings freely available under a CC-BY license and publishing the complete training pipeline, we're ensuring that any researcher, government, or organization worldwide can deploy this technology for their specific conservation needs."

Vultr's infrastructure for the project includes 4x8 MI325X GPU configurations to support both model training and long-term storage of the global dataset. The AMD ROCm open software stack is also being used in the deployment.

Stephanie Dismore, Senior Vice President, EMEA at AMD, said the project demonstrates "what becomes possible when world-class research teams can scale AI with the right compute and an open software foundation."

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