How Generative-Media Platforms Scale to Millions of Users While Cutting GPU Costs

a generative-media platform, an AI-powered creative platform for generating dynamic visual content, is a global leader in the Generative AI space. Founded in December 2022, the platform provides millions of users with a powerful generative AI tool for producing visuals, from concept art and storyboards to production-ready assets and beyond. With its VOLT partnership, a generative-media platform grew its user base dramatically from from launch to millions of users in a single year.

To power real-time image generation models, their team needed rapid, compute-intensive growth for continuous access to high volume, cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs. But this massive infrastructure build-out presented three primary challenges: cost efficiency, availability & latency, and procurement velocity.

In this case study, we explore how a generative-media platform’s partnership with VOLT helped tackle these challenges en route to the platform’s meteoric user growth.

The Situation: A Generative-Media Platform Before VOLT 

Like many other AI startups, as a generative-media platform scaled its platform and user base, its compute costs grew substantially. They knew they needed flexible and timely access to high-performance GPUs, without the premium pricing constraints that are typical of traditional Tier 1 cloud providers.

A Generative-Media Platform’s Strategic Problems

As briefly sketched out above, the generative-media platform team quickly encountered three primary issues after launching their creative AI startup: 

1. Unsustainable Costs: The team’s rapid scaling meant compute expenses quickly consumed time and resources that would be better spent on product development and innovation.
2. Availability & Latency: a generative-media platform needed reliable, low-latency access to hundreds of state-of-the-art GPUs to guarantee their growing user base a high-quality, real-time generative visual experience.
3. Slow Procurement: Procurement timelines were taking weeks or even months, creating painful bottlenecks that directly impacted the team's ability to rapidly iterate their models.

The team realized that any potential infrastructure partner would have to deliver hundreds of GPUs with maximum flexibility and minimal cost. This was the only way the platform could remain at the forefront of the hyper-competitive creative AI industry.

The Solution: VOLT

a generative-media platform chose VOLT to provide the flexible, high-performance GPU compute required for their demanding training and serving workloads. 

“We selected VOLT primarily for their exceptional cost efficiency and procurement flexibility,” the CTO explained. 

• Cost & Reliability: VOLT could provide GPUs at rates of less than half the on-demand price of competing providers, all while maintaining a generative-media platform’s production environment reliability.
• Procurement Flexibility: VOLT’s flexibility was also crucial, as it gave the generative-media platform team a variety of GPU options, depending on their specific needs. 

"Their team's responsiveness, presenting multiple GPU options for any given requirement, gave us the flexibility to optimise our infrastructure spend without compromising on performance,” the CTO added. 

What once took weeks or months to procure could now be provisioned in days. a generative-media platform now had another technical advantage in the competitive creative AI product space. 

Technical Implementation

To integrate VOLT’s GPU offerings, a generative-media platform used a direct SSH access model. This implementation involved adapting the platform’s existing infra orchestration and container control plane so that it could manage the new bare-metal instances provided by VOLT. 

While some internal engineering efforts were needed to create workflows for provisioning, monitoring, and managing resources, this direct access approach enabled the team to scale quickly and confidently.

Throughout the integration process, VOLT provided consistent support, so that the generative-media platform team could bring these new resources online and incorporate them as seamlessly as possible into their existing compute pipeline.

The Results: Accelerated Growth & Sustainable Scale

a generative-media platform’s partnership with VOLT delivered immediate results that were both measurable and strategic, validating the move to a more efficient, flexible, and decentralized compute infrastructure.

Key Performance Insights

• Cost Efficiency: a generative-media platform achieved a reduction of over 50% on comparable GPU workloads, ensuring their aggressive growth remained economically viable.
• Procurement Velocity: Procurement times improved dramatically. What typically took weeks of negotiation and provisioning with traditional providers took just a couple days with VOLT.
• Zero Downtime: VOLT's rapid response to any hardware issues ensures minimal downtime, a critical factor for a platform serving millions of users globally.

Strategic Impact: Focus on Product, Not Costs

The strategic impact of the partnership was profound. a generative-media platform’s infra planning has fundamentally changed, enabling the team to deploy AI service workloads with less concern about costs, and more strategic effort dedicated to product innovation. 

Procurement flexibility also means a generative-media platform can rapidly test new GPU architectures as they become available, keeping the team at the absolute cutting edge of the creative AI innovation curve.

The Future of Creative AI Infra

Following its successful partnership with VOLT, a generative-media platform was acquired by Canva in July 2024. The results of this collaboration show how high-growth, AI-native companies can leverage flexible compute solutions to maintain product superiority without the typical crippling cloud expenses of Tier 1 providers.

With the generative-media platform and VOLT partnership firmly in place, the results clearly showcase  how high-growth, AI-native companies can leverage flexible compute solutions to maintain product superiority without the typical crippling cloud expenses of Tier 1 providers. 

Even better, all of this can be done with exceptional support, flexible procurement, and straightforward but diverse GPU offerings. 

VOLT is proud to power the next generation of creative AI applications like a generative-media platform, so they can keep delivering stunning visuals to millions and even billions worldwide, in reliable, affordable fashion.