AMPD building performance-oriented cloud and urban data centers at the edge
This is a guest post by Phil Shih, Managing Director and Founder of Structure Research.
Canadian cloud and edge infrastructure provider AMPD (pronounced ‘amped’) is an early example of a company building a business in edge computing around low latency use cases such as gaming and digital media.
Background: AMPD was launched in 2015 out of another company in the gaming and digital media industries and has been ramping up over the last couple of years, building out a customer base, revenue stream and footprint.
Details: AMPD is focused on high-performance computing and its stated mission is to ‘eradicate latency.’ It is squarely focused on the gaming and digital media sectors and serves verticals like e-Sports, multi-player gaming, animation, 3D and video rendering. It also targets next-generation enterprises.
AMPD provides cloud infrastructure services built on OpenStack and is building a network of small and distributed data centers that it plans to take into global locations (thought right now it is operating in Canada). It is using colocation for its cloud and in Vancouver resides in a Cologix data center. AMPD also operates edge data centers in urban locations. One of these edge data centers resides in downtown Vancouver (in an area – False Creek – that is a cross-section of both commercial and residential populations and buildings) and is very much an edge facility.
The data center is in a smaller commercial building that is not purpose-built for data centers. AMPD has converted an area within the building for data center use and houses infrastructure there. The facility is designed with sustainability in mind and re-purposes heat and water. The location helps it serve a density of end users within close proximity, reducing latency in the process. AMPD is in the early stages of rolling out its footprint on a global basis and is working with colocation providers.
Capital: AMPD is based in Vancouver, Canada and went public last year. It is listed on the Canadian and Frankfurt stock exchanges. AMPD completed a $3m CAD placement in 2019 and to this point has raised $4m CAD in equity capital.
Analyst Perspective
AMPD is representative of the next generation of independent service providers that are zeroing in on uses cases that require focus and a specific type of underlying infrastructure. For AMPD, this means a cloud platform and infrastructure services that are placed extremely close to end-users. And it naturally attracts a certain type of customer (gaming and digital media for AMPD). On top of this, AMPD has an edge data center operating model that it wants to replicate in numerous locations across major urban areas. AMPD is going after intra-metro edge scenarios, which providers are only starting to try and serve. Vancouver will be a very interesting use case given there is no hyperscale cloud platform nearby or in western Canada for that matter.
About the author:
Phil Shih is Managing Director and Founder of Structure Research, an independent research firm focused on the cloud, hosting and data center infrastructure service provider markets. (more)
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this contributed post are that of the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of EdgeIR.com. Contact us if you want to contribute a guest post.
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Article Topics
AMPD | AMPD Technologies | edge cloud | edge data center | OpenStack | Structure Research
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