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Haseeb Budhani, CEO of Rafay Systems, begins by highlighting the confusion surrounding Rafay’s classification, noting that people variously describe it as a platform as a service (PaaS), orchestration, or middleware, and he welcomes feedback on which term best fits. He then pivots to discussing the current market dynamics in AI infrastructure, particularly the discrepancy between the cost of renting GPUs from providers like Amazon versus acquiring them independently. He illustrates this with an example of using DeepSeek R1, highlighting that while Amazon charges significantly more for consuming the model via Bedrock, renting the underlying H100 GPU directly is much cheaper.
Budhani argues that many companies renting out GPUs are not true “clouds” and may struggle in the long term because they are not selling services on top of the GPUs. He references an Accenture report suggesting that GPU as a Service (GPaaS) will diminish as the market matures, with more value being derived from services. He emphasizes that hyperscalers like Amazon have understood this for a long time, generating most of their revenue from services rather than infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This presents an opportunity for Rafay to help GPU providers and enterprises deliver these higher-level services, enabling them to compete more effectively with hyperscalers and unlock significant cost savings, citing an example of a telco in Thailand that could save millions by deploying its own AI infrastructure with Rafay’s software.
The speaker concludes by emphasizing the increasing importance of sovereign clouds, especially in regions like Europe and the Middle East. Telcos, which previously lost business to public clouds, now have a renewed opportunity to provide AI infrastructure locally due to sovereignty requirements. He states that Rafay aims to provide these telcos and other regional providers with the necessary software stack to deliver these services, thereby addressing a common problem across various geographic locations. He highlights a telco in Indonesia, Indosat, as an early example of a customer using Rafay to deliver a sovereign AI cloud, underscoring the growing demand for such solutions globally.
Personnel: Haseeb Budhani
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