Vultr’s making an aggressive play in the AI infrastructure game by opening up reservations for AMD’s new MI355X GPU. With demand for high-performance compute pretty much outpacing supply everywhere, this puts Vultr in a strong position—at least on paper. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The real test isn’t just about announcing early access; it’s about actual delivery when these chips finally ship. Will Vultr stick the landing, or will this just be another “coming soon” story that fizzles out? Guess we’ll be watching closely.
AMD’s MI355X is no ordinary processor. The MI355X packs 288 GB of high-bandwidth HBM3E memory and delivers up to 8 TB per second of bandwidth. That’s enough to keep massive transformer models in memory, reducing delays that plague deep learning tasks. The chip also introduces support for new ultra-low-precision formats, FP4 and FP6, pushing performance in both training and inference.
Vultr plans to deploy the first units in early-access clusters in New Jersey and Amsterdam. Broader rollouts will follow later in the year. However, the market is watching closely. AMD has claimed a 40 percent efficiency advantage over NVIDIA’s Blackwell B200, but those numbers are internal estimates, not independent tests.
Supply is another concern. The MI355X relies on advanced manufacturing techniques and high-end components that are still scarce. Even with reservations open, delivery depends on factors beyond Vultr’s control.
What’s really at stake is more than just speed. Vultr is testing whether independent cloud providers can compete with the hyperscale giants. If it works, smaller AI startups could finally gain access to cutting-edge hardware without waiting in line behind big tech.
But if it doesn’t? That outcome might remind the industry just how thin the margins really are in the world of AI infrastructure.
