Formula One team Aston Martin Aramco has signed a multi-year agreement with AI cloud provider CoreWeave.

The contract sees CoreWeave becoming the team’s “Official AI Cloud Computing Partner,” enabling Aston Martin to use AI in its engineering process.

As part of the partnership, CoreWeave will help Aston Martin Aramco to move its on-premises computing infrastructure to a cloud computing environment, which Aston Martin hopes will “eliminate hardware constraints.”

The team will use AI to support its car design process, with the aim of using cloud infrastructure to reduce the time it takes to design components.

In addition, the Aston Martin Aramco wind tunnel, which came online in early March, will be named the CoreWeave Wind Tunnel.

Lawrence Stroll, executive chairman, Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team, said: “We’re thrilled to welcome CoreWeave to the team. In the fast-paced world of Formula One, AI cloud computing infrastructure is a decisive edge, and CoreWeave’s cutting-edge platform, purpose-built for accelerated computing, will be instrumental to unlock new levels of performance. United by a fierce ambition to win, we’re excited to harness the power of AI cloud computing together, transforming drive and passion into on-track results.”

Brian Venturo, founder and chief strategy officer, CoreWeave, added: “As a lifelong Formula One fan and a passionate supporter of Aston Martin, it’s an incredible opportunity to partner with a team that represents the cutting edge of performance and innovation. Formula One is a proving ground for what’s possible when talent, technology, and ambition align. With CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform, we’re excited to unlock new opportunities in data-driven engineering and help accelerate Aston Martin Aramco’s pursuit of excellence on and off the track.”

Aston Martin Aramco is a UK-based team, located at the Silverstone race track in Northamptonshire.

Earlier this year, CoreWeave launched its first two UK data center locations, taking space in Digital Realty and Global Switch facilities around London, set to host Nvidia H200 GPUs.

Many of the F1 teams have similar partnerships with cloud providers – Google Cloud is the official cloud and technology partner for McLaren, while Oracle has long been the partner of choice for Oracle Red Bull Racing.

Previously, F1’s regulator – the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) – required that “the solver part or parts of all rCFDs must only be carried out using a compute resource that contains a set of homogeneous processing units” and did not allow the use of GPUs.

CFD, or computational fluid dynamics, is a huge part of how potential car designs are tested.

In 2023, the FIA’s Dominic Harlow told DCD: “The decision to use CPUs was based on the discussions we had quite a while back with the teams, independent industry experts, and our own specialists on how to quantify the amount of compute used for a CFD simulation. We came up with a metric that is effectively based around a core hour.

“For GPUs particularly, it’s obviously an enormous number of cores potentially, and quite difficult to define a core, similarly for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), or other types of processors that you might use for CFD. CPUs are by far the most common, and it was the most practical implementation to regulate.”

He noted at the time that the regulator was watching GPUs closely as they were reaching a “greater level of maturity, particularly for the applications, and not just as accelerators, but actually as the main processor for the simulation. So watch this space.”

This regulation remained in the FIA Sporting Regulations for 2024, published in July 2024. What this means for Aston Martin’s partnership with CoreWeave – a neocloud specializing in GPUs – or the anticipated regulatory framework for F1, is unclear.

DCD has contacted Aston Martin and CoreWeave to clarify the workloads that will be run on CoreWeave’s platform and the hardware underpinning them, as well as the FIA to find out if they are finally looking to make a regulatory change to include GPUs in the allowed hardware for CFD workloads.