Latitude

Latitude.sh is a global bare metal cloud provider that gives developers and infrastructure operators dedicated server hardware deployable in under five seconds, without the cost or abstraction overhead of hyperscaler virtualization. The company has built a particular focus on high-throughput blockchain workloads, with Solana validators and RPC nodes representing one of its primary use cases and a significant portion of its deployed infrastructure.

What It Is

Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, Latitude.sh positions itself between traditional on-premises deployments and public cloud. Rather than carving virtual machines out of shared hardware, the platform gives operators direct, exclusive access to physical servers — with the automation, API surface, and global reach normally associated with cloud providers. In November 2025, the company was acquired by Megaport, the Network-as-a-Service provider, for US$150 million upfront, with up to US$150 million in additional contingent consideration tied to revenue targets. The acquisition united Latitude.sh's compute infrastructure with Megaport's global private network fabric.

At the time of acquisition, Latitude.sh operated more than 7,700 servers across 10 countries and 20 metro markets. By mid-2026, on-demand compute ARR had grown to US$58.7 million, up 31% from US$45 million at the end of 2025.

How It Works

Latitude.sh owns and operates its own servers and network infrastructure rather than reselling capacity from third-party data centers. The platform exposes this hardware through an API-first interface: operators provision bare metal servers programmatically via REST API, Terraform provider, Go SDK, or Node.js SDK, and machines are accessible within seconds of the request.

Servers run on dedicated hardware with no hypervisor layer and no shared tenancy. There are no "noisy neighbor" effects from competing workloads on the same physical machine — a significant consideration for latency-sensitive applications like blockchain validators.

The infrastructure spans 25 locations across five continents as of mid-2026. All server configurations include 20 TB of free monthly egress bandwidth, with additional bandwidth available at $1.25 per TB through pooling across regions and projects. Sub-1ms latency to major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean) is documented for peering regions, and direct connectivity to Megaport's global private network fabric is available post-acquisition.

Solana Infrastructure

Latitude.sh has dedicated Solana-specific hardware configurations optimized for mainnet validator and RPC workloads:

Mainnet Validator (f4.metal.large): AMD 9275F 24-core CPU at 4.1 GHz, 768 GB RAM, dual 480 GB NVMe OS drives plus dual 3.8 TB NVMe data drives, 2×100 Gbps networking.

Mainnet RPC Node (rs4.metal.large): AMD 9354P 32-core CPU at 3.25 GHz, 768 GB RAM, dual 480 GB NVMe OS drives plus dual 8 TB NVMe data drives, 2×100 Gbps networking.

Testnet Validator (f4.metal.medium): AMD 4564P 16-core CPU at 4.5 GHz, 192 GB RAM, 2×10 Gbps networking — a more economical option for testing and lighter workloads.

The platform accepts SOL and other cryptocurrency payments directly, removing friction for validator operators who hold on-chain assets.

As of the Solana solutions page, $2.877 billion in SOL was staked through validators running on Latitude.sh infrastructure. The platform has publicly cited a figure of approximately 20% of all Solana staking running on their servers.

Why Bare Metal for Solana

Solana's architecture creates specific demands that favor dedicated hardware. The network's Proof of History mechanism and rapid 400ms slot times require validators to propagate blocks within tight latency windows — ideally under 100ms between validator peers. Virtualization introduces non-deterministic latency spikes that can cause missed slots and reduced validator performance scores.

Bare metal eliminates the hypervisor layer entirely, providing consistent IOPS from NVMe storage, predictable CPU scheduling, and direct network access without virtual switch overhead. For validators, where rewards are tied to timely block attestation, this consistency has measurable economic value.

The case study most frequently cited by Latitude.sh involves xLabs, a Solana infrastructure operator that achieved 100% uptime and a 0% slot skip rate after moving to Latitude.sh bare metal in Argentina. More broadly, the company reports that operators can save up to 70% of their cloud costs compared to equivalent workloads on hyperscaler virtual machines.

A benchmark from Neon Labs, a Solana-compatible EVM layer, documents a 3x performance increase and 60% cost reduction after migrating from AWS to Latitude.sh, with block confirmation latency dropping from 10–14 seconds to 3.4 seconds.

Ecosystem Partnerships

Jito Labs: Latitude.sh and Jito Labs jointly operate an MEV-enabled validator server program targeting validators that want to run the Jito-Solana client. The program offers c3.large.x86 servers (AMD EPYC 7443P, 256 GB RAM, dual 1.9 TB NVMe, 10 Gbps) at an effective cost of $247/month after a $100 USDC monthly rebate — conditional on maintaining a minimum 50,000 SOL stake and running the Jito-Solana client exclusively. At the time of the partnership announcement, Jito-Solana represented over 15% of Solana network stake-weight. The program includes automated Ansible deployment scripts for node setup in under one hour.

DoubleZero Network: Latitude.sh is a fiber contributor to the DoubleZero protocol, a purpose-built private network for high-throughput blockchains that raised $28 million and launched mainnet-beta in October 2025 at a reported $400 million valuation. Latitude.sh's Chicago and Los Angeles locations are connected to DoubleZero's 100 Gbps private backbone. The DoubleZero architecture uses a two-ring design: an outer security ring built on FPGAs that filters spam and attack traffic before it reaches the inner ring, which provides dedicated low-latency lanes for legitimate blockchain data. For Solana validators, this means deterministic propagation times between key validator regions, lower jitter, and higher throughput without competing for public internet bandwidth. Latitude.sh is also exploring peering arrangements in additional North American and EU regions as the network scales to 26 metro regions across 16 countries.

Megaport (parent company): Post-acquisition, Latitude.sh bare metal servers can be connected to Megaport's global private network fabric without building new circuits. This gives Solana validators and RPC operators a path to private interconnection with cloud providers, other data centers, and network exchange points worldwide.

Platform Features

Beyond Solana, Latitude.sh serves AI/ML workloads, traditional web infrastructure, and Web3 applications on other networks including Ethereum, Aptos, Sui, and Tensor. GPU clusters are pre-configured with TensorFlow and PyTorch and include NVIDIA H100 and GH200 hardware. Storage options include NVMe-backed object, block, and file storage. The platform also provides managed Kubernetes (LKS) using RKE2 with MetalLB and BGP pre-configured, managed PostgreSQL, and networking primitives including private VLANs, DDoS protection, firewall, and cloud gateway connectivity to AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Billing is hourly with no long-term commitment required, though the Jito partnership program operates on annual contracts. Infrastructure-as-code tooling is provided through a Terraform provider and SDKs in Go and Node.js.

Solana Ecosystem Context

The concentration of Solana validators on hyperscaler virtual machines — AWS, GCP, Azure — has been a persistent concern for network decentralization. Latitude.sh addresses this directly, noting that over half of Proof-of-Stake nodes globally run on a handful of major cloud providers. By offering high-performance bare metal at competitive price points across geographically distributed, operator-owned data centers, Latitude.sh provides an alternative that supports both validator economics and network resilience. Its partnerships with Jito Labs and DoubleZero further embed it in the active infrastructure layer of the Solana validator ecosystem rather than as a generic hosting provider.