HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd (TSX-V:HIVE, NASDAQ:HIVE, FRA:YO0, BVC:HIVECO) announced that its BUZZ AI Cloud platform in Asunción, Paraguay, is now operational, with a Columbia University research team running live GPU-based workloads on the system.
The deployment marks the first GPU cluster to go live under the company’s strategy to expand into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) by leveraging its renewable energy assets in Paraguay.
The cluster is housed in a Tier III data center operated by a local telecommunications provider and is designed to support AI model training, inference, and other compute-intensive research tasks.
HIVE said the initial deployment will serve as a proof of concept for running AI compute workloads between New York and Asunción. The company plans to use performance data from the project to inform potential future expansion, including additional Tier III data center capacity in Yguazú. The pace of expansion will depend on customer demand and capital availability.
The Columbia University team is using the infrastructure for non-commercial research focused on large language model (LLM) pre-training. Its work includes developing optimization algorithms aimed at improving model performance while reducing computational and memory requirements. The research spans models ranging from smaller architectures to systems with more than 8 billion parameters, using distributed multi-GPU training frameworks.
HIVE said the collaboration will provide data on latency, throughput, and workload management across long-distance infrastructure, helping shape its roadmap for scaling HPC capacity through 2027.
The company highlighted Paraguay’s hydroelectric power resources and telecommunications infrastructure as key advantages for AI and HPC development. HIVE currently operates a 300-megawatt renewable energy base in the country, with an additional 100 MW under development.
“This deployment marks our first live GPU compute workload in Asuncion and provides the real-world performance data we need to guide our Tier-III expansion roadmap,” HIVE’s executive chairman Frank Holmes said.
“We started in Paraguay with Bitcoin mining. Layering AI and HPC infrastructure onto that existing energy base is the next phase, and this cluster is the first step in validating that approach."
Aydin Kilic, HIVE’s CEO, added that the collaboration with Columbia University offers validation of the platform and will help guide future development plans for GPU-based AI compute in the region.
“We will use this data to validate our proof of concept for GPU Cloud AI compute from New York to Asunción and to build our roadmap for large-scale HPC capacity in Paraguay by 2027,” Kilic said.