On Tuesday, AI infrastructure company Runware announced the launch of its own modular data center called Sonic Inference Pod. Designed as a single transportable unit, the Pod represents a more flexible kind of compute that can sit alongside hyperscalers’ massive data center projects.
Runware says the Pod can offer inference at a higher quality but lower cost than other serverless inference platforms and GPU clouds. The modular design means it’s easy add capacity quickly by creating new pods rather than having to expand a fixed data center. In some ways, this is the future, Flaviu Radulescu, co-founder and CEO of Runware, told TechCrunch.
“We believe distributed compute, positioned closer to end users for faster inference, is what will win in the long term,” he said, noting his company as an example. Aside from a lower price, Radulescu noted that the runware system can scale and add capacity fast, deploy anywhere there is power, and adapt quickly to new hardware releases. The Runware pods also do not use water, but rather a closed-loop cooling system that can be built in days, compared to the months or even years it takes to build traditional data centers.
“Demand for inference is growing faster than facilities can be built,” Radulescu said. “What we want is to power the world’s intelligence, to be the backbone every AI model runs on with capacity that keeps up with demand instead of throttling it.”
