Parasail says its fleet of on-demand GPUs is larger than Oracle’s entire cloud

Summary

Cloud infrastructure is dominated by several large industry players: AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud. While to some it may look like AI is headed in a similar direction, the founders of Parasail think AI infrastructure will look very different — and are betting their company’s fate on it. Parasail works with dozens of providers to deliver on-demand GPUs for companies and enterprises looking to build AI models and applications. Parasail gives customers access to hardware, including Nvidia’s H100, H200, A100, and 4090 GPUs, at a fraction of the cost that incumbents charge, according to the company. “There’s basically three cloud vendors who run the internet, and that isn’t exactly how the internet is being rebuilt when you look at AI,” Tim Harris, one of Parasail’s co-founders and the CEO of Swift Navigation, told TechCrunch. “It’s much more fragmented. The compute is much more fungible and fluid, so you can actually inherently run it in a more horizontal nature, and that’s really what we were trying to do.” Harris added, “We didn’t want a world where AI was controlled from soup to nuts by the hyperscalers.” Harris and Parasail CEO Mike Henry had the idea for the startup a few years back. Henry, the former CPO of Groq, told TechCrunch that he had spent a long time thinking about what it would take to build AI infrastructure that could compete with Nvidia. He said that when he realized AI infrastructure was being rapidly built up by numerous players, he saw an opportunity for a horizontal move. According to Henry, the rapid clip of innovation happening in AI hardware was making it difficult for companies to keep up. “We had to really focus on, how do we make [this] as simple as possible for the customer?” Henry said. “They’re barely keeping up with the open-source model releases alone.” Harris and Henry got started on the company back in 2023, hired an engineering team, and began building in early 2024. Today, there’s no shortage of vendors looking to help ent...