Nscale just bought Anyscale. Here’s why it matters for multi-cloud neutrality.

Cloud platform company Nscale has finalized its acquisition of AI workload scaling specialist Anyscale, signaling a potential shift in the landscape of multi-cloud neutrality for AI software. This move consolidates Nscale's infrastructure capabilities with Anyscale's software layer, creating a full-stack play that focuses on performance rather than vendor lock-in.

Nscale's chief product officer, Dan Bathurst, emphasizes that Anyscale will continue to operate as its own brand and product, offering customers the flexibility to run on various cloud hyperscalers while also providing an optimized solution on Nscale's fleet. However, some analysts, such as Sanjeev Mohan, a former Gartner research VP for data and analytics, argue that Nscale's control of both the software and infrastructure could lead to performance and cost advantages, potentially undermining the neutrality claim.

Bathurst maintains that Nscale is committed to ensuring customers can still achieve optimal outcomes regardless of their preferred cloud provider, but Mohan contends that the software's performance and cost will be superior on Nscale's platform, making it less neutral. The combination of Nscale's GPU-rich datacenters and Anyscale's multi-cloud control plane promises significant cost, performance, and reliability gains, but the question remains: will this vertical integration strengthen or weaken the principles of multi-cloud neutrality?