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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

"Cloud AI Startup Vultr"

We really have let this go too far when a mid tier VPS provider is now a "cloud AI startup".

They're not even a startup, the company is 10 years old.

The investment does make some sense from AMD perspective though. They need people to be able to access their GPUs, on a rental basis. They can't really throw enough money at AWS, GCP or Azure to make a difference, but Vultr is a trusted VPS provider, where AMD can buy a lot of influence for a realistic amount of money.

I do find it interesting that Vultr has such a low valuation, compared to other companies we've seen recently. It seems more reasonable, but they also have an actual business plan and have physical property. I don't know if they are profitable, because the media only focus on revenue, which is pointless if you don't put it into context.

Digital Ocean has a market cap of $3.49B as of yesterday, so $3.5B for Vultr sounds about right.

It's a mundane business in a crowded market, providing services they copied from other companies, which in turn anyone can copy. Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.

> Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.

As of a couple (2-3 years ago) Akamai had no plans or interest to expand into Cloud. They wanted to remain on-prem/hybrid because of existing synergies and strategies. Their CDN business was also heavily used by companies that have cloud BUs.

I don't think this strategy has changed.

Yet Akamai hedged their bet by acquiring a well-known VPS company.

Just because they aren't aggressive about expanding Linode doesn't mean that Linode is not a serious competitor to Vultr. Linode offers nearly everything Vultr does, at a similar price point.

The company is not 10 years old, they loudly declare they've bootstrapped since 1996 https://x.com/Vultr/status/489139385154420736

That makes more sense to me, because I remember have looked at their offerings earlier as they where one of the only places you could run OpenBSD. So I was a little surprised to see 2014 on their websites, but figured I just remembered wrong.

10 years isn't all that long for a company to remain a "startup".

In all fairness, Vultr was the first hosting company to offering fractional GPUs - and they gained a lot of traction with indie developers as a result of it.

Not sure if this was their first GPU offering, but they have been doing it for 2.5+ years (at minimum)

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220524005336/en/Int...

Azure has had fractional GPUs for a while. I am not sure when it started.

Sadly, not available on MI300x quite yet, but AMD is working on it.

Its only an AI startup if it comes from the AI Startup region of California. Otherwise they are a sparkling independent business

Journalists learn a new phrase that sounds techy / flashy and beat it to death. Watch CNBC for 5 minutes and you will see their "experts" use the phrase "hyper scalers" at least 5 times.

Wait until you find out that MinIO, the S3 compatible storage company, is apparently an AI company through and through now. https://min.io/

> the AI revolution is powered by technologies that are either built on MinIO or integrated with it.

Yeah I noticed that also. And it also left me wondering how an S3 you can host yourself is “””””””AI””””””.

Founded in 2014. Sigh.

tweet reference by another poster makes it seem like they've been around since '96 in some form

Upon further digging there is a parent LLC[1] which I presume is the one predating the Vultr entity.

[1]ClanServers Hosting LLC

They where using the brand Choopa before vultr which was a thing since at least 2001. [0]

EDIT: News about their brand consolidation [1]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20010405033628/http://choopa.com...

[1]: https://www.constant.com/transition-to-vultr/

Good old memories working in the adult industry

You seem to be getting downvoted, but as a former Vultr employee I can confirm this is correct

https://www.gameservers.com/corporate/article/27/Clan-Server...

June 20, 2006: "Clan Servers Announces New Identity and Launch of GameServers.com"

https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-aninowsky-b1241924/ shows current role as Founder/Executive ChairmanFounder/Executive Chairman, Vultr, but also lists CEO/FounderCEO/Founder GameServers.com Mar 2003 - Feb 2021

(As someone who played a bunch of TFC, UT, Quake 3 and Counter-Strike back around the turn of the century it's fun to see someone from that world who rode the wave all the way to modern GPU hosting.)

it was Choopa before being Vultr. They had other brands. Current holding has renamed to "The Constant Company" or something.

All of this just makes me suspicious, perhaps unnecessarily so. I'm old enough to remember ENRON stashing a load of debt in their various "Raptor" LLCs before the final implosion.

I get you! In this case it was mostly legitimate. Each brand had a segment; just like Vultr had the cloud segment. It only ate the other ones.

I don't see why Constant exist now tho that it's all Vultr.

This I don't mind. They offer cloud GPUs, why not call it what buyers want to see?

The forgot to add "powered by block chain"

Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) is investing $100 billion (?) in the US and heavily focusing on AI. Maybe they're trying to grab his attention? /s.

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