Cirrascale occupies a unique, and somewhat confusing, position in the market, landing them in our Silver tier. The company operates on a build-to-order basis for its cloud services, a model that feels more like a high-touch colocation or system integration service than a conventional cloud offering. Their offerings include rent-to-own plans and a service where they help customers procure servers (e.g., from Supermicro), which the customer then owns, while Cirrascale provides hosting, setup, and RMA coordination for a fee. This is a fundamentally different approach from most other providers, possibly comparable to Lambda’s Private Cloud business, some of Fluidstack’s agreements, and STN’s managed services.
Our interactions with the Cirrascale team have been challenging. The Cirrascale team feels that our criteria, particularly around software orchestration like Kubernetes, are not relevant to their customers. Their philosophy is to avoid any responsibility at the platform layer, meaning they provide bare-metal access and expect customers to bring and manage their own software stacks. In conversations with customers that use Cirrascale, however, we have heard that they don’t actually like this approach. Integration of a simple DCGM background health check into a Slurm environment that plugs into datacenter operations systems would allow for quicker diagnosis of problems, and more goodput during training runs. It may also save Cirrascale time and money when performing RMAs.
While Cirrascale has thousands of GPUs deployed and a large backlog of customers for new B200 and AMD MI355X systems, their market position has also seen significant shifts. Notably, OpenAI, which once hosted all its owned servers with Cirrascale, migrated its entire infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. This move by a flagship AI lab away from the customer-owned/managed-hosting model to a hyperscaler is a telling indicator of the industry’s direction.
In summary, Cirrascale serves a specific niche: organizations that want to own their hardware assets but outsource the complexities of datacenter operations. However, their hands-off approach to the software stack make it difficult to recommend them for teams that expect a reliable, hands-off cluster. This model places a heavy operational burden on the customer, solidifying Cirrascale’s position in the Silver tier.