Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) and Raghu Raghuram (VMware)
VMware and Nvidia have expanded their partnership to enable enterprises for the era of generative artificial intelligence (AI).
VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia will enable enterprises to customise models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search and summarisation.
Announced at VMware Explore 2023, the fully integrated solution will feature generative AI and accelerated computing from Nvidia, built on VMware Cloud Foundation optimised for AI.
The platform has garnered broader ecosystem support with hardware vendors Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo offering full stack platforms that “supercharge” enterprise large language model (LLM) customisation and inference workloads, VMware says.
VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said that generative AI and multi-cloud are “the perfect match”.
“Customer data is everywhere — in their data centers, at the edge, and in their clouds. Together with NVIDIA, we’ll empower enterprises to run their generative AI workloads adjacent to their data with confidence while addressing their corporate data privacy, security and control concerns,” Raghuram said.
With VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia, enterprises will be able to customise large language models, produce more secure and private models for their internal usage, and offer generative AI as a service to their users.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang added that the expanded partnership comes as enterprises are “racing to integrate generative AI into their businesses”.
“Our expanded collaboration with VMware will provide hundreds of thousands of customers — across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and more — the full-stack software and computing they need to unlock the potential of generative AI using custom applications built with their own data,” Huang said.
Planned platform features include integrated AI tools such as data privacy and secure access, a choice in where to build and run models and GPU scaling optimisations up to 16 vGPUs in a single virtual machine.
Further, the platform will offer accelerated storage with VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture providing performance optimised NVMe storage, and accelerated networking with integration between vSphere and Nvidia NVSwitch technology.
It will also feature Nvidia end-to-end cloud-native framework NeMo, combining customisation frameworks, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools and pre-trained models to offer enterprises a speedy and cost-effective way to adopt generative AI, the companies claim.
Claudia Muldrew attended VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas as a guest of VMware.
