Applied Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: APLD) ("Applied Digital " or the "Company"), a designer, builder, and operator of next-generation digital infrastructure designed for High-Performance Computing (“HPC”) applications, today announced the successful onboarding of its previously-announced first major AI Cloud Services customer, Character.AI. The onboarding, which includes the activation of the first compute cluster for Character.AI, comes just two months after the Company signed its first major AI customer in May 2023. In conjunction, Applied Digital received the first prepayment of its 24-month, $180 million contract, and the services are expected to be fully in place by year-end. The Company will receive additional prepayments as servers are commissioned.
Character.AI is a neural language model chatbot application that generates human-like text responses and participates in contextual conversation.
“We are happy to support Character.AI with our first H100 deployment and look forward to supporting their trajectory toward immense growth within the AI market,” said Applied Digital CEO and Chairman, Wes Cummins. “This milestone serves as a strong validation of Applied Digital’s mission of providing cutting-edge solutions for key players in the AI field through our cloud service.”
“The Applied Digital team has been exceptional to work with, and we’re looking forward to growing this partnership into the future,” said Noam Shazeer, CEO of Character.AI.
Applied Digital’s next-generation datacenters are ideal for hosting HPC applications on-premises. This solution, architected with Supermicro optimized AI servers, provides high compute power at a lower cost to replenish the power density needed for AI/ML workloads.
“We are happy to be working with the Applied Digital team in providing Character.AI a scalable AI Infrastructure designed for optimal performance with green computing efficiency,” said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. “We look forward to further collaboration to deliver first-to-market innovation for the AI market.”
About Applied Digital
Applied Digital (Nasdaq: APLD) designs, develops and operates next-generation datacenters across North America to provide digital infrastructure solutions to the rapidly growing high-performance computing (HPC) industry. Find more information at www.applieddigital.com. Follow us on Twitter at @APLDdigital.
About Character.AI
Founded in 2021 by AI pioneers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, Character.AI is a conversational artificial intelligence platform that uses large language models, deep learning algorithms that can recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate text and other content, to provide individuals with a personalized artificial intelligence experience. The platform lets anyone create and engage with Characters, allowing users to build their own, personalized use cases and share them with others. For more information, visit: https://beta.character.ai/