Kao Data to Host Speechmatics' HPC and AI Supercomputer, Expanding Deep Learning Capabilities

• Speechmatics' work within artificial intelligence-powered neural networks provides highly accurate speech-to-text to global enterprise businesses.
• To support its expansion Speechmatics required a specialist, high-performance data centre operator, capable of hosting their high-density GPU-accelerated supercomputer.
• Kao Data's Harlow campus provides the perfect home for Speechmatics' HPC cluster and ensures their supercomputer is powered by 100% renewable energy with a PUE of 1.2.

LONDON, May 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Kao Data, the specialist developer and operator of high-performance data centres for enterprise, cloud, HPC and AI, has today announced it has secured a new customer contract with Speechmatics, the leading speech recognition technology scaleup, providing highly accurate speech-to-text to global enterprise businesses.

Speechmatics' new high-performance computing (HPC) deployment includes NVIDIA A100 GPUs, housed within an advanced Supermicro computing infrastructure, which will be hosted at Kao Data's Harlow campus. The supercomputer will allow Speechmatics to expand its GPU-accelerated neural network research and development, supporting increasing customer demand for its leading speech recognition technology.

Kao Data was chosen as the UK's premier location for HPC and AI, in addition to its commitments to sustainability and energy efficiency. Speechmatics' high-density supercomputer will benefit from bespoke colocation, an SLA-backed PUE of 1.2, and will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

Recognised in both 2020 and 2021 by the FT1000 as one Europe's fastest-growing companies, and named within NVIDIA's prestigious Inception Program, Speechmatics exploits deep learning technology to deliver highly accurate and ultra-fast speech-to-text technology. The company utilises NVIDIA's acclaimed GPU hardware to complete its aim of understanding every voice, regardless of demographic, accent, or dialect.

Speechmatics' supercomputer will work in tandem with its hyperscale cloud deployments, providing a pioneering example of fluent, hybrid HPC in-action. Central to this capability is Megaport's hyperscale connectivity solutions at Kao Data's Harlow campus, which provides seamless connectivity and on-ramps between the on-premises supercomputer, and Speechmatics' instances within Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

"Powering modern Machine Learning research and development requires an advanced computing infrastructure which only becomes more demanding as you scale." Said Will Williams, VP Machine Learning, Speechmatics. "As we continue to develop our technological edge through the use of self-supervised learning in our models, it's crucial to ensure our data centre provider can scale with our compute demands, but in a sustainable way. Kao Data was the obvious choice for us as the best HPC data centre operator in the UK with the benefit of being powered by 100% renewable energy."

"The opportunity to support Speechmatics in this crucial phase of the company's expansion is an exciting prospect for our organisation, and further underpins Kao Data's position as the UK's preeminent provider of sustainable data centres for HPC and AI," said Lee Myall, CEO, Kao Data. "We look forward to working closely with Speechmatics to help power and support their unique approach of applying neural networks to speech recognition."

Speechmatics' founder, Dr Tony Robinson, pioneered the approach of applying neural networks to speech recognition back in the 1980s, and when higher performance CPUs appeared in the early 2000's, the company was among the first developers to utilise the technology to process large datasets at volume. Today, NVIDIA GPUs have further accelerated Speechmatics' speech-to-text capabilities, and its ability to support leading organisations such as Deloitte, Veritone and Red Bee Media. The company's flexible API easily integrates into customers services, solutions, and applications to offer the most accurate AI-powered transcription capability, with 33 languages already available.

For more information visit Kaodata.com

About Kao Data

Founded in 2014, Kao Data develop and operate high performance data centres for advanced computing. With hyperscale-inspired facilities east and west of London, we provide enterprise, cloud, HPC and AI customers with a world-class home for their compute.

Designed, engineered, and operated by one of the industry's most respected teams, our carrier neutral data centres offer the highest calibre OCP-Ready and DGX-Ready environments. We are the UK's home for the most demanding computing infrastructure, with our east of London facility in Harlow housing NVIDIA's Cambridge-1, the UK's most powerful supercomputer. This is complimented by state-of-the-art facilities in west London, which combined, deliver a data centre footprint of 55MW, all powered by 100% renewable energy.

Backed by leading international investors, Kao Data is one of the UK's most pioneering data centre developers and operators. We underpin our customers' mission-critical workloads with high performance infrastructure, operations and compute efficiencies, representing the future in industrial scale computing.

About Speechmatics

Speechmatics® is the world's leading expert in deep learning and speech recognition, which delivers accurate speech recognition through the first Autonomous Speech Recognition engine. 

Speechmatics' speech recognition technology is used by enterprises in scenarios such as media & entertainment, contact centres, CRM, financial services, security, and software. Speechmatics processes millions of hours of transcription worldwide every month in 33 languages. 

Having pioneered machine learning voice engineering, Speechmatics is enabling companies to build applications that detect and transcribe voice in any context and in real-time. Its neural networks consider acoustics, languages, dialects, multiple speakers, punctuation, capitalisation, context and implicit meanings. In 2019 Speechmatics received the Queen's Award for Enterprise Innovation. 

Its offices are in Cambridge, UK, London, UK, Denver, USA, Chennai, India and Brno, in the Czech Republic. Speechmatics is a registered trademark.