AI infrastructure company Lambda raises $480 million in funding.

Lambda Labs Inc., a startup with a cloud platform optimized to run artificial intelligence models, has announced a $480 million Series D funding round that values the company at $2.5 billion. The round was led by Andra Capital and SGW with participation from more than a dozen other investors, including Nvidia Corp., Super Micro Computer Inc., and prominent computer scientist Andrej Karpathy. "Lambda is investing billions of dollars to build the software platform and infrastructure powering AI," said Lambda co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Balaban.

Developers use Lambda's cloud platform to train AI models, fine-tune them for specific tasks, and run inference workloads. The company disclosed that its data centers currently host more than 25,000 Nvidia graphics processing units and are in the process of adding the chipmaker's newest and fastest GPU, the Blackwell B200, to its cloud. One of the platform's main selling points is an offering called 1-Click Clusters, which allows developers to quickly provision AI clusters with up to 512 of Nvidia's H100 chips. Introduced in 2022, the H100 is two generations behind the Blackwell B200 but remains popular among data center operators.

The GPU servers in a 1-Click Cluster each include a 24-terabyte flash storage pool for storing AI applications' data, and each cluster features three standard CPU-powered servers that process inbound network traffic and run management software coordinating the GPUs. Lambda's cloud servers run an internally developed software bundle called the Lambda Stack, which is based on Ubuntu and includes preconfigured versions of AI development tools, automating much of the manual work typically involved in updating those tools.

Beyond its cloud platform, Lambda offers several AI-optimized hardware products. The company is preparing to launch an AI appliance called Scalar Server that enterprises can deploy in their on-premises data centers, equipped with eight H100 graphics cards. Lambda also offers AI appliances based on Nvidia's DGX architecture with eight GPUs. The company sells a collection of AI-optimized desktop computers known as the Vector series, with the Vector Pro—the most capable model—shipping with four Nvidia chips and preinstalled AI development tools.

Lambda will use the funding proceeds to enhance its cloud infrastructure and software, with one focus being Lambda Chat, a service providing free access to open-source large language models.