The modern web is extremely visual. People are busy and easily-distracted, and smart companies know they have just seconds to attract would-be customers with compelling images, videos, animations, and other eye-catching elements. That’s why iconic brands like Bugatti, Yeti, Porsche, Spotify, and Sonos rely on Imgix to be the engine driving their online visual media.
Every day, Imgix serves more than 8 billion images and videos for brands like these and many others. With a platform designed to unify media optimization, AI transformation, and global delivery, Imgix ensures that its partners’ digital experiences are fast, personalized, and built for performance. Now more than ever, leading organizations are demanding real-time, high-fidelity media, and they need it to be fast.
To meet that demand, Imgix has evolved its infrastructure from private data centers to a full-stack, GPU-based environment on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer. By transitioning to G4 VMs powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, Imgix ramped up its real-time processing capabilities, cutting median latency by 50% and increasing throughput per node by 6x. And it did all of that without changing its core application code.
The challenge: Instant visuals at scale
To capture people’s attention businesses need rich, fast-loading content that can reach millions of users simultaneously across a diverse array of devices.
A big part of that is real-time transformations — resizing, format negotiation, and applying artistic effects — and the computational power required for real-time transformations can be immense.
With inefficient technology, load times can be slow and brands risk giving their users poor experiences. Imgix’s solution to this challenge is a “just-in-time” philosophy. Achieving this requires high-performance instances. And with G4 VMs, they were able to process images instantly upon request rather than pre-rendering and storing millions of image variations.
Adopting the system that runs Google
When companies build on Google Cloud, they get more than just servers: they plug into the same intelligence engine powering Google’s many billion-user products. Imgix is leveraging this structural advantage by using G4 VMs.
G4 VMs incorporate eight NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, two AMD Turin CPUs, and Google Titanium offloads, which act as a dedicated administrative assistant for businesses’ servers. They handle the ”office chores” of security and data traffic in the background while the main processor does a company’s heavy lifting.
The G4 VM’s custom P2P interconnect yields up to 168% more throughput than standard configurations. With this architecture, Imgix can move all its image processing operations to NVIDIA GPUs and run multiple requests in parallel.
Inside the Imgix architecture
Imgix offers more than 150 different visual filters and its architecture is built to handle transformation requests dynamically based on which filters users choose. The pipeline has four primary stages:
