Atlanta Startup SCANNIT Offers AI Companies An Alternative To Long-Term GPU Contracts

ATLANTA, September 8 (Hypepotamus) - Up-and-coming AI companies have a capacity problem.

“New compute hardware goes to the largest buyers first, and by the time it reaches a company with twenty people, the terms attached to it are hyperscaler terms,” said Atlanta entrepreneur Karl Nowak. That means startups getting stuck in long contracts that require them to guess on the capacity they will need for models they have not yet trained. 

“That leaves a seed stage team three bad options. Overpay per token on somebody's API and give up control of the stack. Sign a 36-month lease that ties up the money they raised to build the product. Or run the smaller experiment and never find out what they could have built,” Nowak added. 

Nowak and his co-founders, spread between Atlanta and Germany, are building an alternative with the neocloud company SCANNIT.

Key Takeaways

• Atlanta-based SCANNIT provides flexible access to GPU computing infrastructure for AI companies.
• The startup offers an alternative to long-term GPU contracts, helping companies adjust their computing capacity as demand changes.
• SCANNIT is building in Atlanta to stay close to the Southeast’s growing data center, energy and technology infrastructure.

Inside SCANNIT 

SCANNIT provides companies high-density NVIDIA clusters, engineered for enterprise AI workloads, with flexible, short-term lease options. 

Nowak compares it to providing a serviced office rather than a ten-year commercial lease (which is how hyperscalers and cloud service providers work today). 

“We sell the serviced office: bare-metal GPU nodes on short terms, one to twelve months, priced by the hour, at a premium rate because you can walk away,” he added. “Enterprise contracts set the floor, spot fills in underneath. It is why we can charge a premium hourly rate and still keep the hardware earning close to full time, while making compute available to startups that would not get it otherwise.”

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The SCANNIT team is currently raising a mix of capital and debt, which will go towards software and servers. 

“We have paying customers on hardware, our first node has run at full utilization since launch, and more GPUs land this month,” Nowak added. “Tell us the hardware, the cluster size and the term you want, and our engineering team comes back with a configuration and real availability inside a day."

Building SCANNIT In Atlanta 

Before jumping into the startup space, Nowak spent seven years as a cloud solutions architect at Mercedes-Benz. He previously co-founded depinhouse with Florian Klein and Patrick Scherrer, who have both joined as co-founders of SCANNIT. Rounding out the founding team is Jona Hauch. 

The team noted that to date, most of its capital has come from outside the US and from the west coast.

But the company is based in Atlanta (where it will also soon be adding new hardware capabilities) and has servers up the road in North Carolina. 

“We would like more local investors. We intend to build here and support the local economy, and it would be good to have Georgia capital behind that,” Nowak added.  “The Southeast is where the power is. Atlanta is one of the largest data center markets in the country now, and our constraint has never been engineers. It is megawatts, rack space and someone who picks up the phone when a node goes down at two in the morning. Sitting inside that supply chain, being close to our local partners and enjoying the great Georgia sunny weather is important to us.”

Featured photo: Ales Nesetril / Unsplash