Hot Aisle is an AMD-exclusive neo cloud offering MI300X GPUs in 1-way VMs or 8-way bare metal nodes, on-demand, at a competitive price. Recently, they completed a SOC 2 Type I attestation and achieved HIPAA compliance. Interestingly, they have also released 2-way and 4-way VMs, with the AMD xGMI interconnect passed through and available. This is a unique and competitive offering for developer machines. We know of a few users in the open-source ecosystem that test on Hot Aisle due to flexibility and representative, real-world performance.
AMD’s xGMI interconnect available between 4x GPUs
At this time, Hot Aisle does not have shared storage, monitoring dashboards, health checks, modern security practices, RBAC, vertically integrated support, or the ability to run at scale (i.e. anything more than 2 or 4 machines at a time). They claim to have slurm or kubernetes on their website, but when we reached out for help it was not setup. The first time we tried to test, Hot Aisle was unavailable and did not have any bare metal servers or virtual machines available for us to use, though we were able to grab some later on.
Business is booming – only 3 GPUs available!
It is difficult to understand how Hot Aisle will make progress beyond providing cheap MI300X while the market moves to MI325X and MI355X. While other providers already full set up and offering access to paying customers for MI355X since September, Hot Aisle’s MI355X may not come until the end of this year, or even into early next year. Focusing on individual developer machines instead of clusters is a niche, focusing on AMD GPUs instead of NVIDIA GPUs is a niche, and focusing on the MI300X instead of the MI325X or MI355X is a niche. So, a niche of a niche of a niche market.