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Benzinga
Benzinga
Business
Anusuya Lahiri

AI Startup iGenius Taps Nvidia For AI Data Center In Italy Leveraging Blackwell Chips

On Thursday, Italian startup iGenius announced partnering with Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) to build a massive data center in southern Italy by mid-2025. The center will feature close to 80 of Nvidia’s advanced servers.

iGenius aims to develop open-source AI solutions for secure industries, including financial services, healthcare, and the public sector, leveraging Nvidia’s software tools.

Also Read: Nvidia Partners With Vietnam Government To Develop Advanced AI And More

iGenius is building a data center to accommodate 80 of Nvidia’s most powerful servers, called GB200 NVL72 machines, each with 72 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips in them, Reuters reports.

iGenius CEO Uljan Sharka told Reuters that the European AI startup, valued at over $1 billion, has raised 650 million euros so far in 2024 and is taking on additional capital for the AI computing system, “Colosseum.”

The iGenius Colosseum supercomputer features Nvidia DGX GB200 systems containing thousands of Nvidia Grace Blackwell Superchips.

iGenius will use the Colosseum supercomputer to build advanced AI applications, including training open-source generative AI and trillion-plus-parameter large language models.

The Colosseum will be located in Europe and features liquid cooling.

It will likely deliver 115 exaflops of computational performance, powered by renewable energy from Italy.

Colosseum will collaborate with Nvidia to develop AI models to support financial consulting, patient services, and government planning.

Built with the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform, Nvidia Nemotron models, and the Nvidia NeMo framework, the iGenius AI models will be offered as Nvidia NIM microservices.

iGenius plans to offer customers the option to deploy the models and microservices as fully managed applications, including cloud-based or on-premises Nvidia accelerated computing.

Blackwell chips are Nvidia’s most eagerly awaited graphics processing units (GPUs). Oppenheimer analyst Rick Schafer projected several billion dollars in revenue from Blackwell for the January quarter.

Schafer flagged investors modeling 5 million—6 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025.

Reportedly, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (NYSE:TSM) is weighing production of the front-end process of Blackwell chips at its Arizona plant.

Nvidia stock is up over 201% year-to-date due to the AI frenzy. Investors can gain exposure to the stock through VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) and Grizzle Growth ETF (NYSE:DARP).

Price Actions: NVDA stock closed lower by 0.26% at $144.64 premarket at the last check on Friday.

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