The Avalanche Foundation has officially formed a strategic partnership with cloud infrastructure company Aethir, bringing a significant boost to AI projects that are a part of the InfraBUIDL program, as grantees now become a part of the tech company’s big $100M Ecosystem Fund, gaining various benefits.

What Does the Avalanche Foundation’s Partnership With Aethir Bring to InfraBUIDL AI Projects?

With this partnership, AI-driven projects building on the Avalanche network and approved through the InfraBUIDL (AI) program will now be fast-tracked into Aethir’s $100M Ecosystem Fund. Through this fund, accepted projects are given computational resources to help them better scale their products, alongside compute grants to support teams in successfully delivering innovative web3-powered AI experiences. This partnership also benefits Aethir’s community, as the collaboration will lead to the integration of the community’s AI projects into the InfraBUIDL (AI) Program, uniting the two AI ecosystems into a powerful force of technological innovation.

Next to funding and computational support, this collaboration also means that Aethir is now a part of the InfraBUIDL(AI) Program committee, so they too will now have a say in choosing which projects should get funded, while providing valuable insights in the process. Thanks to this partnership, AI-driven projects will now get “comprehensive” support from both sides, enabling developers to deliver quality products.

According to Avalanche’s official X thread, they have decided to partner with Aethir because they are revolutionizing decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure by using “over 400,000 state-of-the-art GPU containers” to deliver high-performance and scalable computing resources for AI and gaming studios who are looking to innovate in the blockchain space through AI and gaming, making the new partner “a leading force in supporting the most advanced AI workloads.”

Aytunç Yildizli, the Chief Executive Officer at the Avalanche Foundation, said the following in an official announcement:

“Aethir’s integration of Avalanche into its $100M ecosystem fund marks a major milestone for the Foundation. This is our first major partnership involving third-party grant activity, and Aethir’s $100M in computing power will accelerate AI and gaming projects on Avalanche.”

What Is Aethir’s $100M Ecosystem Fund?

Aethir’s $100M Ecosystem Fund is a big grant initiative designed to support visionaries in forming AI and gaming companies while helping them create innovative web3 projects in those same fields. The main focus of this fund is on helping bring innovations in decentralized AI to life. That being said, the decentralized cloud infrastructure provider will look towards prioritizing AI projects from the InfraBUIDL(AI) Program, giving AI developers open doors to useful resources that can help them in scaling on Avalanche, with grant allocation said to differ depending on the amount of computing resources each project needs to achieve their goals.

What Is Avalanche’s InfraBUIDL(AI) Program?

The InfraBUIDL(AI) Program is a new initiative by the Avalanche Foundation that aims to support AI-driven projects who are integrating AI with Avalanche’s decentralized infrastructure. This program offers up to $15 million in direct funding and retroactive grants, helping accelerate innovation in the Avalanche ecosystem while supporting development of intelligent dApps.

The review committee for this program, next to the newly-added collaborator, also consists of an AI-powered member referred to as Alfred. Alfred is described as being a key member of the committee, according to the program’s official website, as the AI is capable of evaluating and improving project proposals. Basically, Alfred analyzes submitted pitch materials and documentation, then generates insightful, intelligent questions that help in understanding your project, and finally completes the process by bringing a detailed analysis to the review committee.

Anyone looking to find more info and apply to this program can still do so through the official website.

Last month, Avalanche announced the minting of $500k worth of Beam Node tokens in order to support the decentralization of the gaming-focused Beam network.