VMware, Lenovo partner to offer businesses Nvidia-powered gen AI services

IT hardware firm Lenovo has teamed up with cloud computing major VMWare and chip giant Nvidia to offer generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based services for business.

At VMware Explore 2023, being held in Las Vegas from August 21-24, 2023, Lenovo and VMware, announced their first turnkey solutions from their joint Edge and Cloud Innovation Labs, delivering hybrid multi-cloud capabilities to mid-size companies to speed up and ease the process of digital transformation.

According to an official release, Lenovo also unveiled its reference design for Generative AI in partnership with VMware, a Lenovo ThinkSystem solution featuring Nvidia-accelerated computing and software that is built to help “businesses deploy and commercialize powerful generative AI tools and foundation models.”

“VMware and Lenovo are partnering to help clients of all sizes become digital companies by investing in the infrastructure required to power a new generation of modern applications, such as Generative AI,” said Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware.

Moreover, Lenovo is seemingly extending its partnership with VMware to help customers harness the value of their data, deploying NVIDIA AI solutions to transform their business with outcomes by leveraging Nvidia AI Enterprise, the enterprise-grade software that powers the Nvidia AI platform. Nvidia AI Enterprise includes NVIDIA NeMo software to accelerate the development and deployment of production-ready large language models (LLMs).

“This expanded collaboration with VMware is a transformative step in enabling more businesses to seamlessly leverage modern edge, AI, and hybrid cloud capabilities,” said Sumir Bhatia, President – AP, Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, said in a statement.

Lenovo said, it will also work with VMWare to launch a new private cloud venture that they say will “enable IT admins and developers to more easily build, run, manage, and secure traditional and next-gen applications across multiple private data centers and cloud providers”.

In a report published on 16 August, research firm Gartner said it has positioned generative AI on the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, which is projected to reach transformational benefit in the next 2-5 years. 

“The popularity of many new AI techniques will have a profound impact on business and society,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “The massive pre-training and scale of AI foundation models, viral adoption of conversational agents and the proliferation of generative AI applications are heralding a new wave of workforce productivity and machine creativity.”

In recent months, companies are also showing a lot of enthusiasm in getting into the generative AI bandwagon to serve enterprises across the globe. The report also affirmed that despite early days, generative AI is top of mind for many business and IT leaders, though it has not yet significantly impacted IT spending levels.