Confirming rumors rumors from a few weeks ago, Amazon.com Inc. today unveiled a new cloud computing service for artificial intelligence and other data-intensive applications.

The new addition to Amazon Web Services’ Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is based on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from Nvidia Corp., which increasingly are used in the branch of AI called deep learning neural networks that benefit from the ability to do data crunching in parallel on a massive scale.

“These instances were designed to chew through tough, large-scale machine learning, deep learning, computational fluid dynamics, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and computational finance workloads,”  AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said in the announcement.

The cloud giant’s new “instance,” or slice of a computing virtual machine, called the P2 uses up to eight of Nvidia’s Tesla K80 accelerator cards. The largest P2 configuration provides about 40,000 cores in total, which Amazon claims makes it the most powerful GPU-optimized cloud instance on the market.

To put this into perspective, AWS EC2 vice president Matt Garman highlighted that the P2 can perform operations involving single-precision floating-point numbers (values occupying 4 bytes) seven times faster than the largest instance in the previous-generation G2 series. And it’s even better at handling double-precision values, delivering up to 60 times more performance than its predecessor for a total of 23 teraflops.

The instance is available immediately from Amazon’s U.S. and Ireland data centers. It should put the cloud giant in a much better position to take on rivals like Microsoft Corp. that have also been targeting GPU-optimized workloads lately. The software giant rolled out an instance series optimized for artificial intelligence workloads only a few weeks ago, while IBM Corp. introduced a competing virtual machine family back in July.

Both offerings are based on the same Tesla K80 as the P2, which means that it’s well within the vendors’ reach to level the playing field. And they’ll no doubt try, if the fierce competition that the IaaS market has seen so far is any indication.

This one-upmanship is good news for the growing number of organizations that are looking to run their AI algorithms, simulations and other high-performance computing in the cloud. In a note to clients today, Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry said the announcement is a positive for both Amazon and Nvidia.

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