Latitude

Latitude.sh is a global bare metal infrastructure provider that deploys dedicated servers in under five seconds across 25 locations on five continents. The company positions itself as a bridge between traditional on-premise hardware and hyperscaler convenience, offering full-metal performance without the virtualization overhead that comes with AWS, GCP, or Azure. For the Solana ecosystem, Latitude.sh has become one of the primary hosting providers for validator and RPC node operators, with the company reporting more than $4.178 billion in SOL staked across infrastructure it hosts.

The Case for Bare Metal on Solana

Solana's consensus mechanism places demanding and specific requirements on hardware: high single-thread CPU performance, substantial RAM, fast NVMe storage arranged for ledger and accounts separation, and low-latency networking capable of keeping pace with block production at 400-millisecond slots. Virtualized cloud instances introduce jitter and resource contention that hurt vote latency and skip rates. Bare metal eliminates that layer entirely, giving each validator or RPC operator exclusive access to the underlying hardware.

Latitude.sh built a dedicated Solana solutions page and three distinct server configurations tuned for different use cases. The mainnet validator tier — model designation f4.metal.large — runs an AMD 9275F processor with 24 cores at 4.1 GHz, 768 GB of RAM, dual 480 GB NVMe drives for the operating system and hot data, dual 3.8 TB NVMe drives for the accounts database and ledger, and dual 100 Gbps network interfaces, starting at $1,341.17 per month. For RPC workloads, which require even more storage headroom to serve historical data, the rs4.metal.large pairs a 32-core AMD 9354P at 3.25 GHz with 768 GB of RAM and dual 8 TB NVMe drives on the same dual-100 Gbps network, starting at $1,645.67 per month. Operators running testnet nodes or lower-stake mainnet validators can use the f4.metal.medium — a 16-core AMD 4564P with 128 GB of RAM and 10 Gbps networking — from $388.50 per month.

All instances include 20 TB of free monthly egress, which matters for Solana nodes that stream ledger and gossip data continuously. The platform accepts payment directly on the Solana blockchain, alongside standard payment methods.

Solana Stake Footprint

Independent analysis from Helius, measuring validator stake distribution at epoch 685 in August 2025, found that Latitude.sh was the second-largest hosting provider for Solana validators by stake weight, with roughly 19% of total network stake running on its infrastructure. That level of concentration reflects both the company's competitive pricing relative to hyperscalers and the quality of its hardware configurations, but also draws attention in discussions about geographic and hosting-provider decentralization on Solana.

Jito MEV Validator Program

Latitude.sh formalized a partnership with Jito Labs to offer a combined MEV-enabled validator package targeted at operators who want to capture maximum extractable value rewards without maintaining their own infrastructure from scratch. The joint program provides an AMD EPYC 7443P server (24 cores, 256 GB RAM, dual 1.9 TB NVMe, 10 Gbps networking) at $247 per month all-inclusive, with a $100 monthly USDC rebate available to validators who meet participation requirements. The package includes network connectivity to the Jito block engine within one millisecond and unlimited network egress for enrolled validators. To qualify, operators must run on Solana mainnet with a minimum of 50,000 SOL in stake and run the Jito-Solana client exclusively during the contract term. At the time of the program's launch, it had attracted more than 80 participants representing approximately 15% of Solana network stake-weight.

DoubleZero Integration

In November 2025, Latitude.sh connected its Chicago and Los Angeles data centers to the DoubleZero Network's 100 Gbps private backbone — a dedicated fiber infrastructure designed for Solana validators. Before this integration, validators hosted outside Europe faced latency penalties when communicating with the high concentration of stake and leadership slots in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, which pushed many operators toward European data centers regardless of their geographic preferences. The DoubleZero connection gives Latitude.sh customers in Chicago and Los Angeles deterministic connectivity with lower jitter, faster block propagation, and reduced missed blocks, without the constraints that public internet routing introduces during high-traffic periods. The integration enables geographic decentralization of validators without the performance tradeoff that previously discouraged US-based deployments.

Platform Capabilities Beyond Solana

Latitude.sh's broader product portfolio covers the infrastructure needs that Web3 teams typically have alongside their validator or RPC operations. The Metal product line extends to GPU clusters configured for machine learning inference and training, with NVIDIA A100, L40S, and B300 hardware available. A bare metal Kubernetes service (LKS) automates cluster provisioning, networking, and load balancing, allowing teams to run containerized workloads on dedicated hardware. NVMe-backed distributed storage is available in object, block, and file configurations. A Cloud Gateway connects Latitude.sh deployments to AWS, GCP, and Azure through private links, which matters for teams that want to keep their compute on bare metal while maintaining connections to managed cloud services. DDoS protection and private networking are included across the platform.

In July 2026, Latitude.sh announced a $594 million funding round to expand into AI inference at scale, with plans to bring 2,048 NVIDIA B300 GPUs online for on-demand use. That expansion reflects the company's intent to serve the broader compute-intensive market while maintaining its data center footprint that Solana infrastructure operators already rely on.

Developer Experience

The platform exposes a fully documented RESTful API and provides a Terraform provider, enabling infrastructure-as-code workflows for teams that manage validator and RPC deployments programmatically. Automated bare metal provisioning completes in under five seconds. Alongside the Jito partnership's scripted onboarding, Latitude.sh publishes documentation and guides specific to Solana node configuration, including recommendations for NVMe partition layouts that separate accounts and ledger data for optimal validator performance.

Customer xLabs, which runs infrastructure on Latitude.sh, reported achieving 100% uptime and 0% skip rate — two metrics that directly affect a Solana validator's stake-weighted earnings and delegator retention.