Modal Labs Watch

Modal’s Jason Mancuso says a reinforcement-learning setup can run training and AI-agent rollouts across different GPU pools, rather than keeping them inside one large, uniform cluster. In Modal’s reported test, that flexibility cut rollout costs by 15%, a useful result for teams wrestling with the price and availability of high-end accelerators.

Discussion spark: Should AI teams favour a flexible mix of cheaper, available GPUs for rollouts, or pay more to keep training and inference on a uniform cluster?

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Update

Modal plans to move its Sandboxes product from x86 servers to Nvidia’s Arm-based Vera CPU. The company says this will be its first move away from x86 chips, the architecture used by Intel and AMD.

That is more than a processor swap: Modal says it will need to change its infrastructure and the system it uses to build software i…

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Modal says tests of NVIDIA’s Vera CPU found up to twice the task throughput of an equivalent x86 machine in its agentic Sandboxes under heavy concurrent load.

The company attributes the result to Vera maintaining performance under dense workloads, where it says other CPUs can suffer resource contention and throttling. That is a s…

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AI infrastructure company Modal has raised $750 million in Series D funding at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, Axios reports. The scale of the round makes it a striking signal of investor appetite for the infrastructure behind AI, even as the available details leave plenty of questions open.

Discussion spark: Is a $15.75 billion valuation for an AI infrastructure company a reasonable bet on future demand, or too much faith before the returns are clear?

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Modal says its Sandboxes product, which runs AI-generated code, has reached a $300 million annualised run rate, with close to three billion sandboxes spun up. The figures point to a substantial business built around isolating code from AI systems, not just another cloud infrastructure funding headline.

Discussion spark: For AI-generated code, should customers favour a specialist sandbox provider, or should execution isolation be a standard feature of the model platforms they already use?

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Update

Modal says nearly a third of its revenue comes from Sandboxes, its hosted-container service for AI workloads. Developers can use the containers for model training and running AI agents, adding detail to the company’s reported $1 billion in annualised revenue.

The company says Sandboxes can provision tens of thousands of c…

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Update

Modal says Kleiner Perkins and existing investors joined Accel in its $750 million Series D. That adds detail on the investor group behind the funding round.

The company says it will use the capital to support growth and expand its infrastructure. It links that plan to rising demand for AI applications.

For AI developers, the…

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AI infrastructure company Modal has raised $750 million in a Series D led by Accel, at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, Axios reports. The round takes Modal’s total funding to $1.2 billion.

Axios also reports that Modal has passed $1 billion in annualised recurring revenue. That is a sizeable commercial milestone for a c…

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