Opera has announced that it will be deploying a new AI cluster in Iceland this month to power its future AI services. You’ve probably heard that generative AI is power-intensive, Opera has decided to address this issue by powering this AI cluster using green energy entirely.
The company said that it expects artificial intelligence features to be present throughout the browser going forward and not be limited to chatbot features. For this reason, it needs to prepare now to provide these AI services for its users.
Commenting on the development, Krystian Zubel, VP of Group IT at Opera, said:
“Opera was the first browser to introduce built-in AI services in the spring of 2023, offering both PC and mobile users the benefit of its generative AI assistant, Aria. Aria is fast evolving, and we continue to expand its capabilities as a browsing companion for our users. Iceland will complement our existing infrastructure across the globe as a green, cost-efficient, and centralized hub for computation-heavy tasks, ensuring that Opera has the infrastructure in place to seize the opportunities we see and allowing our company to rapidly evolve and expand its AI services.”
The new cluster is an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD using the newest NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. The energy comes from hydroelectric and geothermal power sources, and the cooling is provided naturally by the country’s climate.
Like many other technology companies, Opera has been quick to include AI features in its browser, its main AI service is Aria, a chatbot service built into its range of browsers.
Opera’s forward-looking approach is contrasted to that of its rival Vivaldi. The latter company announced a few days ago that it won’t be integrating a large language model (LLM) into its browser because it’s concerned about LLM hallucinations and the amount of power they consume.