By Krystal Hu

Feb 19 (Reuters) - Lambda, a cloud computing firm specializing in providing hardware and services to power artificial intelligence development, has raised $480 million in a Series D equity round from investors including Nvidia NVDA.O, the company told Reuters.

The round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, the family office of early Google GOOGL.O investor Scott Hassan, bringing its total equity raised to $863 million.

The company did not disclose its valuation, but sources said this round gave the firm a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion. ARK Invest, G Squared, and servers provider Super Micro SMCI.O also participated in the round.

Lambda offers cloud services and software designed for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models. A major part of the business is renting out servers powered by Nvidia’s artificial intelligence GPUs, which has benefited from the spiking demand for such hardware in the AI boom.

It also offers software and hosted access to enterprises to run and deploy different AI models, including open source ones.

Lambda CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban said the company has seen much growth in the deployment of open source models, including China's DeepSeek.

"Lambda is really well positioned as a company to take advantage of open source AI models like DeepSeek-R1 because we have well over 25,000 GPUs on our cloud platform that can be readily repurposed to host these open source models," he said in an interview.

The launch of DeepSeek-R1 last month significantly accelerated demand for Nvidia H200 chips from its clients, according to Balaban. Enterprises are pre-purchasing large blocks of Lambda's H200 capacity even before public availability.

He added the new investment would be used to purchase more Nvidia chips for its cloud platform, as well as expansion of its software products including Model Inference API, and its Chat AI Assistant.

Founded in 2012 by a group of AI engineers, Lambda's hardware and cloud business serves over 5,000 customers across industries including manufacturing and financial services, as well as the U.S. government.

(Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Jan Harvey)

((Krystal.Hu@thomsonreuters.com;))