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AIRackspace Technology® and AMD have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) establishing a framework for a multiyear strategic partnership to create an Enterprise AI Cloud, purpose-built for regulated enterprises and sovereign workloads, where security, governance, and accountability are “non-negotiable”.
Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute & Enterprise AI, at AMD comments:
“Enterprise AI is quickly moving from experimentation to production, and that requires a compute foundation engineered for performance and efficiency at scale. 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.”
Today’s dominant model usually requires enterprises to rent GPU capacity by the hour and carry the operational burden themselves including integration, security and accountability. This collaboration proposes to invert that model by integrating AMD Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs into a fully managed, governed stack. Through this understanding, the companies aim to establish a new category of managed enterprise AI infrastructure where dedicated AMD compute is embedded inside a governed managed operating model, with Rackspace owning the stack from silicon to outcomes.
In simpler terms, instead of companies renting AI processing power and managing everything themselves, Rackspace plans to offer a fully managed AI environment built using AMD hardware. That means Rackspace would handle the infrastructure, security, operations and performance management on behalf of customers.
Gajen Kandiah, CEO, Rackspace Technology, explains:
“As enterprises move AI out of the lab and into production environments, they’re asking who they can trust to run it there. 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 AMD collaboration is intended to position Rackspace to complete its curated enterprise AI stack and introduce four integrated capabilities. Together, these capabilities are designed to form a complete, integrated stack from bare metal compute and developer-ready inference tooling through a fully operated inference runtime with defined SLAs to a governed Enterprise AI Cloud. The aim is to give enterprises a single operator accountable for every layer, calibrated to the sovereignty, performance, and compliance requirements of each workload.
Included in the Framework is:
• Enterprise AI Cloud: A fully managed, private and hybrid AI environment built on AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD EPYC CPUs, and Rackspace’s governed operating model. Rackspace would assemble, integrate, and operate the full stack, from accelerated compute to AI inference and agents in production, for enterprises requiring sovereignty, compliance, and operational accountability.
• Enterprise Inference Engine: A context-aware inference runtime that retains domain knowledge, session history, and enterprise-specific data context across queries, enabling AI agents and large language models to perform with the consistency and institutional memory that production environments require. Rackspace would own the SLA and take responsibility for availability, scaling, and performance, enabling organizations to run large language models and AI agents using their own proprietary data with full auditability and cost accountability.
• Inference as a Service: Dedicated, managed AMD Instinct GPUs with developer-ready inferencing and fine-tuning toolkits delivered as a governed alternative to commodity GPU rental. The customer brings their own model and engineering team. Rackspace would provide reliable bare metal AMD Instinct capacity with operational discipline, hardware-level support, and performance SLOs.
• Bare Metal AMD Instinct: Proposed dedicated, high-performance bare metal AMD Instinct compute for customers requiring physical isolation, deterministic performance, and direct hardware access for demanding and highly customized training and inference workloads
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This article contains forward-looking statements, and caution should be exercised when relying on such information that may or may not occur in the future.The post Rackspace Technology and AMD sign MoU for new Type of Enterprise AI Platform first appeared on News in the Channel.