How GMI Cloud struck gold by pivoting from crypto to AI cloud biz

Alex Yeh is on a roll. His company, GMI Cloud, raised US$82 million in a series A round led by VC firm Headline Asia in October.

This came after the firm secured an undisclosed amount from Thailand-based renewable energy firm Banpu Next in a seed round in July, as per Tracxn data.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

So far, the total amount of funding raised for the two-year-old company is US$92 million, with Yeh saying the startup may once again start to seek backing in 2025.

The company, which rents out GPUs to clients, says it’s on a mission to let anyone deploy AI instantly.

“If it’s just one sentence, it’s literally: We’re building AWS for AI,” the GMI Cloud founder and CEO tells Tech in Asia.

The funds will help the San Jose, California-based startup launch another data center in the US, which will be its fourth. It also has AI data centers in Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia.

The company serves dozens of clients in the healthcare, research, and telecom industries.

In September, it also partnered with Singtel, “combining” the telecom conglomerate’s GPU resources and infrastructure with its own.

So why is this cloud startup gaining traction today?

Pivoting from crypto to cloud

Yeh, who is originally from Taiwan, admits the last two years have been very different from 2021. It was then that China outlawed his bitcoin mining business, pushing him to move his operations to the US.

By 2023, he had built three colocation data centers (colos) – facilities that rent out space for servers, covering the cost of electricity, water, and broadband connections. Two of them are located in Arkansas, while one is in Texas. Created primarily for bitcoin mining, these data centers still function as legacy operations with GMI Cloud.

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