AMD has been given a foot in the door into data centre land after Verizon gave the outfit street cred by using its SeaMicro servers to build out several data centres. SeaMicro pioneered a category of servers with a sea of low power, simple computing cores. AMD acquired SeaMicro last year for $334 million, and the Verizon deal means that AMD is getting a big payoff from that deal.

Kevin Clark, director of cloud platform engineering at Verizon, said his company still use a variety of computing architectures for its data centres. However the SeaMicro servers will be used on its new global cloud platform, Verizon Cloud, and cloud-based object storage service.

He claimed SeaMicro would solve many of the problems of cloud flexibility. SeaMicro used Intel Atom chips before AMD acquired it, and it still offers several models with Atom chips. But the new SeaMicro servers pack frugal AMD cores.