Chip giant Advanced Micro Devices and hedge fund LuminArx Capital Management raised $333 million for a growth financing round for cloud startup Vultr, a sign of the hot demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure. West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Vultr said it is now valued at $3.5 billion and plans to use the financing to acquire more graphics processing units, or GPUs, the chips that power AI models. The funding is Vultr’s first injection of outside capital. The company got its start providing cloud-computing for businesses’ information-technology systems and it also offers AI computing. Vultr said its AI cloud service, in which it leases GPU access to customers, will soon become the biggest part of its business. For AMD, the investment is a way for “customers to experience AMD GPUs through their platform,” said Mathew Hein, AMD’s chief strategy officer of corporate development. “We look at them as somebody that’s going to be bringing up AMD capacity this generation and future generations.”

Full exclusive : Data center operator Vultr raised $333 million led by LuminArx, with participation from AMD and others, at a $3.5 billion valuation, its first outside funding round.