Introducing Megaport AI Exchange

Introducing Megaport AI Exchange

  • News
  • September 30, 2024

Supercharge your AI innovation with secure, scalable, and high-performance connectivity for your AI workloads.

AI isn’t magic.

Just like every other system in the IT world, AI is built on computing infrastructure – and the performance of your AI applications hinges on this infrastructure and the connections that bind it.

Megaport is already trusted to reliably interconnect the network infrastructure of thousands of global customers, so for us, the next step was clear: Take our proven experience in cloud networking and apply it to AI interconnection.

Enter Megaport AI Exchange (AIx): – bringing all the benefits of Megaport’s Network as a Service (NaaS) to the AI and compute layer of your network.

The growth of AI

As we learn how to harness AI more productively and ethically, it will continue to pervade our virtual lives – so much so that Gartner predicts that “by 2027, spending on AI software will grow to $297.9 billion”.

There are a huge number of AI platforms available on the market today, each designed to serve a rapidly rising number of use cases across various industries, business functions, and users. These service offerings aren’t just limited to major cloud service providers anymore, either. With the scarcity and high cost of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), a plethora of independent providers have entered the market offering GPU as a Service (GPUaaS), offering more choice and availability to businesses exploring or enhancing their AI strategy.

With more choice and more providers in general, AI infrastructure continues to become more geographically dispersed. Now, businesses are tasked with finding ways to interconnect these resources in a performant, secure, and scalable manner, just like they have done with their public cloud environments in hybrid or multicloud scenarios.

This is all compounded by the fact that enterprises have yet to grasp the full potential of AI for their specific needs. Challenges include understanding capabilities, quantifying benefits, identifying cost savings, and developing monetization strategies, to name a few.

IT teams also lack historical data to accurately size compute and network needs for these emerging applications, making it critical to scalable and future-proofed AI solutions that can flex with their requirements.

This is where Megaport AIx comes in.

What is AIx?

Megaport AIx is a connected ecosystem of service providers, available on our marketplace, that integrate seamlessly with your Megaport network. With AIx, Megaport is set to do for AI infrastructure what we did for the cloud many years ago, interconnecting all of your AI infrastructure, workloads, and providers on our private, global, scalable network backbone.

Are you an AI service provider? Join AIx and enable Megaport customers to connect to your services in under 60 seconds.

You can access powerful infrastructure and GenAI models on AIx, including:

  • GPUaaS providers: Access cutting-edge GPU resources on demand, ensuring your projects have the computational power needed for intensive tasks such as training deep learning models and performing complex simulations.
  • Third-party AI models: Gain access to advanced AI capabilities with pre-trained models designed to accelerate innovation and streamline implementation, offering high-quality solutions for a wide range of applications.
  • Storage and compute: Drive efficiency and performance across your AI projects by integrating new or existing storage and compute resources. Connect large data sets and high-performance processing.

Why use AIx?

AIx takes you beyond just cloud and data center connectivity use cases, integrating AI into your network management to give you more value from your virtual ecosystem.

On our elastic global network underlay, you can:

  • Interconnect your entire distributed AI ecosystem to integrate AI into your network management.
  • Instantly connect to and access a variety of AI services with on-demand provisioning.
  • Run your applications across our diverse, path-protected network for uninterrupted operations.
  • Seamlessly integrate your network across service providers, geographic locations, and endpoint types.
  • Use our private, high-speed connections to meet the demands of your AI workloads, scaling up and down as needed.
  • Effortlessly expand your AI capabilities with the ability to rapidly scale and continuously make additions and upgrades to your AI-enabled network.

How can I use AIx?

As with every solution Megaport offers, with AIx you have the control to architect a network that’s optimized for your business setup and requirements, all on our private, global network backbone.

Common use cases for AIx include:

Cloud to GPUaaS

Connect your cloud storage and compute environments to a GPUaaS provider using Megaport for rapid data flow across clouds, getting cost-effective and high-speed AI model training and inferencing.

AIX - Cloud to GPUaaS

Data Center to GPUaaS

Integrate your on-premises infrastructure with leading AI offerings and third-party AI models. On Megaport’s network underlay, your data center, cloud, and GPU environments will connect effortlessly for optimized AI workflows.

AIX – Data Center to GPUaaS

Edge to GPUaaS

Use Megaport Virtual Edge to run your AI applications all the way to your network edge. Bring your service providers, data centers, edge locations, and AI workloads together on one integrated network for low-latency connections that keep up with real-time data processing.

AIX – Edge to GPUaaS

How can I connect to AIx?

Connecting to an AIx provider is easy, with the same process as connecting to any other destination within our marketplace.

You can create a connection request to one of our service providers in the Megaport Portal by:

  1. Navigating to the Services page
  2. Selecting the Port, MCR, or MVE for the connection and clicking +Connection
  3. Clicking Megaport Marketplace as the destination type
  4. Searching for and selecting your provider
  5. Selecting a destination port
  6. Specifying connection details
  7. Adding your VXC
  8. Placing your order.

This process is explained in more detail in our Docs Portal.

Get connected to Megaport AI Exchange

How can I join AIx?

If you’re an AI service provider, joining AIx will make your business available to thousands of new customers, enabling them to connect to your services in under 60 seconds.

Signing up is easy – just fill out the form linked below and we’ll get you started.

Join Megaport AI Exchange

 

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