Google Cloud is rolling out the red carpet for Y Combinator (YC) startups, offering them a dedicated and subsidised cluster of Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs.
This initiative aims to help these budding companies build AI models, with the hope that some will evolve into massive, compute-hungry businesses.
James Lee, Google Cloud’s general manager for startups and AI business, emphasised the goal of nurturing these startups early on. “We want to surround them with a lot of love and warmth early in their life cycle so they get familiarised with building and working on the Google Cloud Platform,” Lee told TechCrunch. The strategy is simple: grow with the startups and become their lifelong partner.
YC’s Summer 2024 startups will get priority access to this dedicated cluster, along with $350,000 in cloud credits over two years. The bet is that future unicorns will fall in love with Google Cloud. Diana Hu, YC group partner, noted that 5% of YC startups over the past 18 years have become unicorns, making this a smart partnership for Google.
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“There’s a lot of excitement that the next generation of startups will probably not just unicorn, but decacorn, and they’re getting built as we speak,” said Hu. The partnership aims to attract more AI startups by offering generous compute resources, addressing a common issue for early-stage AI startups: being compute-restrained.
Hu explained that large enterprises can secure multi-year deals with cloud providers for GPU access, but small startups often struggle. This partnership offers a dedicated cluster for YC companies, crucial for training AI models. “For GPU and AI workloads, they’re more like high-performance computing workloads in batches,” Hu said. “You don’t need the server running all the time, but you need a lot of them in a spiky workload.”
In addition to the dedicated cluster, Google will offer YC startups $12,000 in Enhanced Support credits and a free year of Google Workspace Business Plus. YC startups can also connect with Google’s internal AI experts through monthly office hours.
With other venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz also offering GPU clusters, the competition to attract AI startups is heating up. While the exact number of GPUs in this deal remains undisclosed, Hu assures it’s sufficient for YC’s foundation model companies to train their models.
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