It’s been a year since Octave Klaba, the founder of OVHcloud, acquired Shadow following a commercial court order. After a stabilizing period, the company is now ready to launch a new plan, a new service and a new B2B offering.
Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. People can pay a monthly subscription fee to access a full-fledged computer in a data center near them. It is a Windows instance, which means you can install whatever you want — games, photo editing software, Microsoft Office, you name it.
But the service works particularly well for gamers, as everything has been optimized for video games, from latency, 4:4:4 color support and gamepad compatibility to specifications. Currently, subscribers get the equivalent of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $29.99 per month, or €29.99 in Europe.
This is fine if you want to play Fortnite or Minecraft, but there are more recent GPUs that can improve your gaming experience. That’s why the company is announcing an upgrade for people who want better specifications.
Instead of a separate plan, the Shadow Power Upgrade is an add-on on top of your base subscription. For another $14.99 per month (or €14.99), you can access a server with an AMD EPYC 7543P CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads, 16GB of RAM and a recent GPU.
Depending on the data center, users will get an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070 or the equivalent GPU in Nvidia’s professional GPU lineup. Users could also get a professional AMD Radeon GPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture (AMD Radeon Pro V620).
As you can see, Shadow is partnering extensively with AMD instead of relying exclusively on Intel for CPU models and Nvidia for GPU models. This could help when it comes to sourcing negotiations and supply chain constraints.
When it comes to availability, users will be able to pre-order the Power Upgrade this summer; it will be available this fall.
As for storage, if you think 256GB is not enough, you can purchase additional storage blocks in 256GB increments for $2.99 (or €2.99) per block per month. The maximum is 2TB.
The company is also launching new markets as people living in Canada and Austria will be able to subscribe this fall. As a reminder, Shadow is currently available in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.
International expansions for a cloud computing service can be a bit difficult, as you want your users to live as close as possible to a data center where you operate (because of latency concerns). There are currently eight data centers with Shadow servers — three in France, one in Germany and four in North America.
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