Exclusive: Essential AI chooses Google's Cloud

Details: Essential AI will leverage Google Cloud TPU v5p chips to train and serve its models and also build its LLMs on top of Google Cloud's global infrastructure.

Catch-up quick: Essential AI was started by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, two of the authors of a key research paper on the transformer technology that underlies today's large language models.

• The San Francisco startup is backed by March Capital and Thrive Capital, along with investments from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment and Nvidia.

What they're saying: "Our partnership with Essential AI underscores our shared vision to help organizations accelerate their ability to digitally transform with generative AI," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement to Axios.