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Armada, a developer and manufacturer of mobile and relocatable data centers that provide computing power to remote and challenged areas, has raised $131 million in a strategic funding round that will be used to scale its newest product, Leviathan, which the startup describes as a megawatt-scale data center that can be used to train artificial intelligence models at the edge.
The funding brings the total to more than $200 million in venture capital the San Francisco-based company has raised to build out its family of Galleon ruggedized portable and relocatable data centers that also include Beacon, a briefcase sized unit; Cruiser, which comes in a standard 20-foot container; and Triton, housed in a 40-foot container. Leviathan offers 10 times the compute power as Triton, the company said on Thursday.
Leviathan consists of two 45-foot containers, one with racks for graphics and central processing units for compute power, another for power distribution, and a 20-foot container for the liquid cooling system. The relocatable data center is power agnostic so it can run on local or even stranded power sources such as natural gas, and even solar, in remote areas where there is no connectivity.
Galleon products have been deployed with the Navy, which is “testing it in a variety of hostile environments,” Dan Wright, co-founder and CEO of Armada, told reporters on Wednesday during a roundtable. The service is using the data center technology “for processing data from autonomous technologies, drones, etc. at the edge in remote, hostile, disconnected environments,” he said.
Leviathan is priced at a “small fraction of a traditional data center,” does not require construction and local permitting so can be deployed in weeks rather than years, is modular, distributed, energy and connectivity-agnostic, and can be updated easily with new computing chips and cooling, Wright said. The new product will allow AI training at a “massive scale,” he said.
Companies and other users can adapt existing AI models or create new ones, and Leviathan is “enabling that at the source of the data, at the source of the power in a way that is much more efficient and faster than any other way of doing it,” Wright said.
Armada has two missions, he said. First is to “bridge the digital divide” by providing the 70 percent of the world that does not have access to AI and hyperscale data centers with its Galleon products. Second is to “ensure that the world runs on the American AI stack” and not one based on Chinese technology, he said.
The funding round included new strategic investors Pinegrove, Veriten, and Glade Brook, with participation from existing investors Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Shield Capital, 8090 Industries, Microsoft’s [MSFT] M12 venture fund, Overmatch, Silent Ventures, Felicis, and Marlinspike.
