AMPD Ventures Inc. announced that it has signed a deal with Variational AI Inc. to expand its machine learning infrastructure hosted at AMPD's DC1 sustainable data centre. Variational AI is discovering new small molecule therapeutics for COVID-19, cancer, and other disease areas, and needed to greatly increase its machine learning compute capacity. AMPD and Variational AI have signed a new 24-month contract that approximately triples Variational's machine learning compute capacity. AMPD views this deal as validation of AMPD's commitment to blending the convenience of cloud with the power of the high-performance computing architectures necessary for the latest cutting-edge applications. AMPD, in conjunction with Variational and NVIDIA engineers, conducted precise engineering tests to architect a solution optimized specifically for the profile of the machine learning workload required by Variational. This expansion of the AMPD machine learning platform is one of the first practical outcomes of AMPD recently joining the NVIDIA Cloud Service Provider Partner program. Graphics Processing Units ("GPU") are a critical component of high-performance computing for artificial intelligence and machine learning. While a Central Processing Unit ("CPU") is good at handling multiple tasks, GPUs are typically designed to handle a few specific tasks very fast in parallel. So far, these tasks have also included the mining of crypto currencies and processing the high-quality graphics of the latest 3D games. GPUs can also solve the complex math problems for machine learning better than traditional CPUs.