VMware and NVIDIA have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of generative AI in enterprises. The collaboration aims to empower hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on VMware’s cloud infrastructure to leverage generative AI technology and enhance their operations.
With the launch of VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, enterprises will have the opportunity to customize models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search, and summarization. This integrated solution will feature generative AI software and accelerated computing from NVIDIA, built on VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized specifically for AI.
The partnership between VMware and NVIDIA comes as enterprises worldwide are racing to integrate generative AI into their businesses. By leveraging the capabilities of the VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, customers across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, will gain access to a full-stack software and computing solution needed to unlock the potential of generative AI using custom applications built with their own data.
The platform is expected to deliver several benefits to enterprises seeking faster business outcomes. It will allow for the customization of large language models, making it possible to create more secure and private models for internal usage. Additionally, it will enable organizations to offer generative AI as a service to their users while securely running inference workloads at scale.
According to McKinsey, generative AI has the potential to contribute up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy. Enterprises recognize the value of streamlining the development, testing, and deployment of generative AI applications to harness this transformative technology effectively.
VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA will include integrated AI tools that empower enterprises to run proven models trained on their private data in a cost-efficient manner. The platform will incorporate NVIDIA NeMo, an end-to-end, cloud-native framework included in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which allows enterprises to build, customize, and deploy generative AI models virtually anywhere.
Moreover, NeMo leverages TensorRT for Large Language Models (TRT-LLM) to accelerate and optimize inference performance on the latest LLMs on NVIDIA GPUs. With these capabilities, VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA enables enterprises to build and run custom generative AI models using their own data on VMware’s hybrid cloud infrastructure.
The launch of the NVIDIA AI Workbench will provide enterprise developers with a solution to access community models like Llama 2, available on Hugging Face. Developers will be able to customize these models remotely and deploy production-grade generative AI in VMware environments.
Leading technology companies Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo will support VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. These companies will be among the first to offer systems that supercharge enterprise LLM customization and inference workloads using NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, and NVIDIA ConnectX-7 SmartNICs. These solutions provide enhanced generative AI inference and training performance, offload and isolate compute loads, and deliver accelerated networking for demanding AI workloads.
The collaboration between VMware and NVIDIA builds upon the companies’ decade-long partnership. They have co-engineered VMware’s cloud infrastructure to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise with performance comparable to bare metal. This collaboration has allowed mutual customers to benefit from resource and infrastructure management, as well as the flexibility offered by VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware intends to release VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA in early 2024. This announcement marks an important milestone in the journey towards widespread adoption of generative AI in the enterprise sector. By offering a comprehensive solution, VMware and NVIDIA are set to revolutionize how businesses leverage generative AI to drive innovation and growth across industries.