Fei-Fei Li chooses Google Cloud, where she led artificial intelligence, as the primary provider of computing solutions for World Labs

Cloud service providers are chasing AI unicorns, and the latest is Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. The startup just chosen Google Cloud as its primary computing provider for training artificial intelligence models, a move that could possibly be value a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the company said Li’s tenure as Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence scientist was irrelevant.

During the company’s Google Cloud Startup Summit on Tuesday announced World Labs will devote a big portion of its funds to licensing GPU servers on the Google Cloud Platform and ultimately to training “spatially intelligent” artificial intelligence models.

A handful of well-funded startups constructing basic AI models are in high demand in the world of cloud services. The largest deals include OpenAI, which exclusively trains and runs AI models on Microsoft Azure, and Anthropic, which uses AWS and Google Cloud. These corporations often pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for computing services, and sooner or later they could need much more as they scale their artificial intelligence models. This makes them beneficial customers for Google, Microsoft, and AWS to construct relationships with from the starting.

World Labs is definitely constructing unique, multimodal AI models with significant computational needs. The startup just raised $230 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, in a deal led by A16Z, to construct global artificial intelligence models. Google Cloud’s general manager of startups and AI, James Lee, tells TechCrunch that World Labs’ AI models will sooner or later have the ability to process, generate and interact with video and geospatial data. World Labs calls these AI models “spatial intelligence.”

Li has deep ties to Google Cloud, having led the company’s artificial intelligence efforts in 2018. However, Google denies that this deal is a result of this relationship and rejects the concept that cloud services are only a commodity. Instead, Lee said the greater factor is services, such as a high-performance toolkit for scaling AI workloads and a big supply of AI chips.

“Fei-Fei is obviously a friend of GCP,” Lee said in an interview. “GCP wasn’t the only option they were considering. But for all the reasons we talked about – our AI-optimized infrastructure and ability to meet their scalability needs – they ultimately came to us.”

Google Cloud offers AI startups a alternative between proprietary AI chips, tensor processing units or TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, which Google buys and that are in additional limited supply. Google Cloud is attempting to persuade more startups to coach AI models on TPUs, mainly to cut back dependence on Nvidia. All cloud service providers today are limited by the shortage of Nvidia GPUs, so many are constructing their very own AI chips to satisfy demand. Google Cloud says some startups are training and inferring exclusively on TPUs, but GPUs remain the industry’s favorite AI training chips.

As part of this agreement, World Labs has chosen to coach its artificial intelligence models on GPUs. However, Google Cloud didn’t say what prompted this decision.

“We had been working with Fei-Fei and her product team, and at this point in the product roadmap it made more sense for them to work with us on the GPU platform,” Lee said in an interview. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a permanent decision… Sometimes (startups) move to other platforms like TPU.”

Lee didn’t reveal how large World Labs’ GPU cluster is, but cloud providers often devote huge supercomputers to startups training artificial intelligence models. Google Cloud promised one other startup training basic AI models, Magic, a cluster with “tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs,” each with more power than a high-end gaming PC.

These clusters are easier to vow than to deliver. According to reports, Microsoft is a competitor to Google’s cloud services struggles to satisfy insane computational demands OpenAI, forcing the startup to make use of other computing power options.

World Labs’ contract with Google Cloud is non-exclusive, which suggests the startup can still strike deals with other cloud service providers. Google Cloud, nevertheless, says most of its operations will proceed.