US-based cloud computing company Rackspace Technology and AMD have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop an enterprise AI cloud tailored for regulated industries and sovereign workloads.
The multi-year partnership outlines a framework for combining AMD’s Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs within Rackspace’s managed operating model to address requirements for security, governance, and accountability.
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Under this agreement, Rackspace will integrate AMD’s dedicated computing hardware into its AI infrastructure, managing the technology stack from the underlying hardware to the delivery of outcomes.
The companies aim to move away from the prevailing industry approach, where enterprises typically rent GPU capacity by the hour and take on the responsibilities of integration, security, and management, towards a fully managed, governed service model.
As part of the collaboration, Rackspace plans to offer a curated stack of services. These will include a managed enterprise AI cloud environment leveraging AMD hardware and a context-aware inference engine to support advanced language models and AI agents.
The offerings also feature inference-as-a-service with dedicated compute infrastructure for custom model development, as well as bare metal AMD Instinct compute for users with specific requirements for physical isolation and deterministic performance.
Rackspace will be responsible for integrating, operating, and supporting these AI services, including meeting service level agreements for availability, scalability, and performance.
The partnership aims to provide a managed alternative to traditional GPU rental, helping enterprises operate with stronger auditability and compliance.
Rackspace Technology CEO Gajen Kandiah said: “Governing AI infrastructure in regulated environments with defined accountability is not something you bolt on after the fact. It must be built in from the start.
“Rackspace and AMD are building exactly that and in doing so, establishing a new category of enterprise AI infrastructure that the market has been asking for.”
The agreement will provide industries that face stringent regulatory, compliance, and sovereignty requirements with a single accountable operator for all layers of their enterprise AI workloads.
AMD Compute & Enterprise AI senior vice president and general manager Dan McNamara said: “Our collaboration with Rackspace delivers AMD AI compute into managed, private and governed environments so enterprises can deploy AI with the performance and flexibility their workloads demand.”
In February this year, AMD and TCS confirmed plans to collaborate on developing a rack-scale AI infrastructure in India based on the AMD “Helios” platform.
