R2 provides an affordable, zero egress solution to support the architectural freedom needed to train AI models
Groundbreaking generative AI companies, including Character.ai, Leonardo.ai., Lexica.art, and SiteGPT.ai, rely on Cloudflare
San Francisco, CA, May 16, 2023 – Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced that Cloudflare R2 Storage, the distributed object storage that eliminates egress costs, is providing essential infrastructure for leading generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies. Cloudflare is announcing several partnerships with AI infrastructure companies to help companies avoid vendor lock-in and make training generative AI models accessible and affordable.
Generative AI requires massive amounts of computing power and relies on graphics processing units (GPUs) to quickly and efficiently process enormous amounts of data to train the large language models (LLMs) that are at the core of their offerings. With the sudden acceleration of generative AI companies coming on the market, these companies are now facing a scarcity of processing power from their cloud providers. This requires companies to move data across multiple clouds or regions to find available GPUs, resulting in skyrocketing costs that cloud providers typically charge for data transfer – especially transfers that are frequent or over large distances. In addition, as new GPU chips optimized for AI workloads are released, AI startups want the flexibility to use the best technology available and not be locked into a single ecosystem. Cloudflare R2 Storage solves both these challenges by providing zero-cost egress – making it simple to migrate large volumes of data across clouds and easily use best-in-class technology.
“Cloudflare is providing the first developer platform built for the age of AI,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “AI companies understand that Cloudflare is designed for speed and efficiency, enabling them to be competitive in this rapidly changing market. As they grow in popularity and traffic, we’re there to help with storage, security, and performance as costs and bots sneak up on them. Our global network and zero egress fees means these developers can focus on innovating fast, and worry less on the cost and technical decisions that sneak up on them.”
“AI has always put a high demand on storage needs, and Generative AI will only accelerate that trend,’ says Dave McCarthy, Research Vice President at IDC. “While the cloud has become a logical place to store data, 64% of technology decision makers claim they are spending more than their budgets. The secret is out – data transfer fees are a big factor in overall cloud costs.”
Cloudflare Partners with AI Infrastructure Companies
Cloudflare is announcing several new partnerships to support generative AI companies using R2 Storage as part of the infrastructure for their training models. These partnerships will ensure that the innovation around AI-specialized and distributed GPUs works the way it was intended, eliminating vendor lock-in and making training generative AI models accessible and affordable:
AI Companies Rely on Cloudflare
AI companies like Character.ai, Leonardo.ai, Lexica.art, and SiteGPT.ai rely on Cloudflare to provide the tools needed to serve up real-time inferences, images, conversations, and more with users around the world.
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About Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.
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