Exclusive: TD Synnex Nabs Over 1,000 Nvidia GPUs For Channel In Nebius Cloud Deal
TD Synnex officials Francisco Criado and Jack Donato tell CRN that the Nebius partnership will help channel partners gain access to high-end GPUs in the cloud, which have become a scarce resource due to high demand from AI-native companies.
TD Synnex has reserved over 1,000 high-end Nvidia GPUs in the cloud to help solution providers overcome supply constraints and get their customers moving on AI projects.
The U.S. distribution giant, which won Nvidia’s Distribution Partner of the Year award for the Americas last month, made the cloud commitment for AI computing clusters based on Nvidia’s B300 GPU with neocloud provider Nebius. TD Synnex announced the deal on Tuesday at its High-Growth Conference in Puerto Rico.
[Related: Nvidia Channel Chief: Neoclouds Represent ‘Next Phase Of Opportunity’ For Partners]
The Fremont, Calif.-based company is accepting purchase orders for B300-based instances through Nebius now, with availability expected to begin in July. The agreement lasts for a year, and it gives TD Synnex the option for renewal.
Nvidia Americas channel chief Craig Weinstein told CRN last month that the company sees the partnership as an important way to reach enterprise customers.
“It means that we have an [Nvidia Cloud Partner] that’s going to offer cloud capability to the ecosystem to ensure [that] enterprises can iterate and solution providers have a platform to leverage,” he said.
TD Synnex-Nebius Deal Seen As Way To Combat Supply Scarcity
In an exclusive interview with CRN, TD Synnex officials Francisco Criado and Jack Donato said that the Nebius partnership will help channel partners gain access to what has become a scarce resource due to high demand from AI-native companies.
“There’s literally no capacity available right now,” said Criado, senior vice president of cloud, security and AI at TD Synnex.
TD Synnex expects the Nebius deal to benefit many of its strategic partners who otherwise “wouldn’t get the prioritization that they would need to gain access to the GPUs,” according to Donato, senior director AI and neocloud vendor solutions at TD Synnex.
“Our ability to give them that prioritization up there with the general hyperscalers and neocloud providers just gives them access, in general,” he said. “Could they get the same capacity direct? Maybe, but there’s no availability.”
TD Synnex: Deal Represents First Of Its Kind In Disty World
According to TD Synnex, the Nebius engagement “marks the first time a global IT distributor has reserved a dedicated Nvidia AI factory-grade cluster from an AI-native cloud provider.”
“It’s not your typical distribution go-to-market where you’re buying and reselling something,” Criado said. “We’re actually committing and we’ve purchased this reserved instance within the Nebius data center ... and we will now work with our partners and their customers to [drive consumption].”
Based on Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra architecture, the B300 debuted last year as the company’s flagship GPU for x86-based servers that connect eight of the accelerator chips through the vendor’s NVLink interconnect.
TD Synnex said Nebius’ B300 instances are meant for a wide range of AI use cases, ranging from training to inference and fine-tuning.
“You’re basically getting the compute and the GPUs, and you put whatever foundations, blueprints, frameworks, applications, [software] stacks on top of it—whatever the preference is to that partner and customer,” Criado said.
Criado: The Initial Batch Of Instances Could Sell Quickly
Criado said that TD Synnex’s deal with Nebius has generated so much interest among channel partners that he thinks the initial batch of instances “will probably be purchased pretty quickly,” which has the company already thinking about future expansion.
“We’re committing to this very early for July, and as soon as this capacity is sold, we’re going to be looking at [bringing more capacity through] the next data center buildout,” he said.