Blackfuel opens its first AI inference cloud in Barcelona on AMD GPUs
Blackfuel opens its first AI inference cloud in Barcelona, with AMD GPUs at Digital Realty's BCN1 data center. What it is and what it means for the city.
By Marc Nieto
Barcelona hosts the first deployment of Blackfuel, a new cloud dedicated solely to artificial intelligence inference, that is, running already-trained AI models to produce answers. It runs in Digital Realty’s BCN1 data center on AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and liquid-cooled Dell servers, according to announcements from Digital Realty on 30 September and AMD on 5 November.
In short
What: Blackfuel opens its first AI inference cloud in Barcelona.
Where: Digital Realty’s BCN1 data center, with AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and Dell PowerEdge XE9785L servers.
With whom: Dell and NTT DATA handle deployment and integration.
Why it matters: companies and startups can reserve AI capacity operated in Barcelona, with more control over where their data is processed.
What Blackfuel announced
Blackfuel describes itself as an inference-native «neocloud»: it does not train models but provides the capacity to run them in production. According to AMD, the company emerges from stealth with more than $250 million in contracted revenue under multi-year customer agreements. Barcelona is its first deployment and the starting point for a wider network.
The company calls its platform the AI Token Grid: accelerator clusters connected through a common software and commercial layer. The idea is to sell measurable output, not machines: customers pick a model and reserve capacity against throughput, latency and data-location requirements.
One new feature is Logical GPUs: instead of renting an entire multi-GPU deployment, customers reserve a share of a model’s serving capacity for a fixed monthly fee.
Server racks in a data center. Image: Carl Lender / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
The role of Digital Realty and AMD
Digital Realty, one of the world’s largest data center operators, hosts the deployment at BCN1 and connects it to ServiceFabric, its private interconnection platform spanning more than 800 of its own and third-party data centers. According to the company, this brings inference closer to where enterprise data and applications already live, without crossing the public internet.
AMD supplies the Instinct MI355X GPUs and its open ROCm software. A new AI cloud choosing Barcelona for its first site, rather than Frankfurt, Amsterdam or London, is a signal for the sector.
What it means for Barcelona’s ecosystem
AI capacity nearby: startups and companies in the city get another way to run models without depending on a single large provider.
Data in Europe: choosing where data is processed matters more and more in banking, health and insurance, especially with the EU AI Act coming into force.
MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Image: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
What we don’t know yet
Neither Blackfuel nor Digital Realty has disclosed the number of GPUs or the power allocated to the deployment, or named its customers. There are no independent performance benchmarks of the platform yet.
Frequently asked questions
What is AI inference?
It is the stage where an already-trained model is used to respond: generating text, classifying documents or running an agent. It is what companies consume day to day.
Where is Blackfuel’s cloud in Barcelona?
In Digital Realty’s BCN1 data center, with liquid-cooled Dell servers and AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs.
Can startups use it?
Blackfuel plans to offer dedicated clusters, managed inference and reserved capacity for a monthly fee. Terms and pricing will depend on each agreement.
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By Marc Nieto
