IBM and startup Together AI ​have signed a $240 ​million multi-year agreement to build ​a large-scale artificial intelligence cluster on IBM Cloud using Nvidia systems, the companies said on Tuesday.

The ‌cluster will ⁠provide ⁠inference for open-source AI models, which have gained traction as businesses seek to rein in AI costs and weigh concerns about cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.

Inference, the process of ⁠running trained ‌AI models to generate ​responses, has ​become one of the largest ⁠drivers of demand for computing capacity, ​prompting cloud providers and chipmakers to ​spend billions of dollars expanding AI infrastructure.

The cluster on IBM Cloud will use Nvidia's HGX B300 systems, which link the chipmaker's newer Blackwell processors, ‌and its Spectrum-X Ethernet networking gear. Nvidia has said the Blackwell ​chips are ​optimized for ⁠AI inference.

San Francisco-based Together AI's platform lets companies train and run AI workloads on open ​models such as DeepSeek, MiniMax and Kimi at lower costs than closed systems. It was last valued at $8.3 billion in July.