AMD and ConsenSys' Blockchain Data Center Venture Gets $20M of Seed Funding

The joint blockchain cloud computing venture of computing giant AMD and Ethereum-focused development firm ConsenSys has received $20.5 million in funding.

According to a June 25 announcement, AMD and ConsenSys’ W3bcloud joint venture obtained the funds through the sale of convertible notes to the founding firms and several family offices in the United Arab Emirates. Jörg Roskowetz — the head of the blockchain business unit at AMD — said, “Parallel and distributed computing focused on blockchain use cases is a fast-growing segment of the industry.”

W3bcloud’s co-founder and CEO Sami Issa told Cointelegraph, “AMD will design the high-performance hardware technologies required to optimize for the decentralized computing infrastructure.” ConsenSys, on the other hand, will provide blockchain software solutions and engage in research and development efforts.

Much needed infrastructure for a growing ecosystem

Sami explained that the blockchain ecosystem needs industrial grade computing infrastructure to scale and reach mass application. He pointed out that the currently available cloud infrastructure is not optimized for Ethereum transactions and decentralized workloads. He said that the firm is open to work on blockchains other than Ethereum, but is for now focusing on this network due to its market’s size.

This first funding round is meant to finance the development of W3bcloud’s first Ethereum data centers. Issa explained that he believes the platform’s growing ecosystem needs such infrastructure:

“The trustless, permissionless and decentralized economy requires robust and dedicated data centers to scale. W3BCLOUD brings together the pre-eminent GPU manufacturer and the leading blockchain developer to build the compute infrastructure for the blockchain economy.”

Issa explained that the company plans to provide enterprise grade decentralized computer infrastructure. He also noted that the GPU infrastructure can be also used for more traditional applications such as machine learning, storage, rendering and video transcoding. He said that W3bcloud is already in talks with multiple potential customers.

Cloud platforms start offering blockchain services

As blockchain adoption continues progressing at an increasingly fast pace, several cloud computing platforms started offering services that leverage this new technology.

For instance, in late February 2019, Google Cloud’s platform marketplace added the development software of corporate-oriented cryptocurrency Ontology (ONT).