VMware Inc. and NVIDIA have announced an expansion of their partnership aimed at preparing the multitude of enterprises that rely on VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the era of generative AI.
The partnership introduces “VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA,” a comprehensive solution that empowers enterprises to tailor models and deploy generative AI applications. These applications encompass intelligent chatbots, assistants, search tools, and summarization utilities. The platform offers seamless integration of generative AI software and accelerated computing capabilities from NVIDIA. This cohesive solution, built on VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized for AI, enables organizations to leverage generative AI capabilities with confidence.
Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware, highlighted the synergy between generative AI and multi-cloud capabilities, stating, “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.”
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, emphasized the global momentum behind the integration of generative AI, saying, “Enterprises everywhere are racing to integrate generative AI into their businesses. Our expanded collaboration with VMware will offer 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.”
The collaboration between VMware and NVIDIA aims to streamline the development, testing, and deployment of generative AI applications, driving business benefits more efficiently. According to McKinsey, generative AI has the potential to add up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.
“VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA” will enable enterprises to customize large language models, create secure and private models for internal use, provide generative AI as a service to users, and conduct secure inference workloads at scale. The platform incorporates integrated AI tools to facilitate the deployment of proven models trained on private data in a cost-effective manner.
The anticipated benefits of this platform include enhanced privacy through data adjacence, a wide array of options for building and running models, robust performance on NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure, scalability for AI workloads, cost-efficiency through resource optimization, accelerated storage and networking capabilities, and rapid deployment and time-to-value.
The platform will feature NVIDIA NeMo, an end-to-end, cloud-native framework included in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the operating system of the NVIDIA AI platform. This framework simplifies the process of building, customizing, and deploying generative AI models across various environments.
At VMware Explore 2023, NVIDIA and VMware will showcase how developers can utilize the new NVIDIA AI Workbench to pull community models, such as Llama 2, customize them remotely, and deploy production-grade generative AI in VMware environments.
Leading computer manufacturers, including Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo, will support “VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA” by offering systems that optimize enterprise Large Language Model (LLM) customization and inference workloads using NVIDIA L40S GPUs, NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, and NVIDIA ConnectX-7 SmartNICs.
NVIDIA L40S GPUs offer up to 1.2x more generative AI inference performance and up to 1.7x more training performance compared to the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU. NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs accelerate and offload various cloud-native AI services, while NVIDIA ConnectX-7 SmartNICs deliver accelerated networking for demanding AI workloads.
The partnership between VMware and NVIDIA exemplifies a collaborative effort to drive the adoption and integration of generative AI capabilities across enterprises, promoting innovation and transformation across industries.
