VMware has announced a collaboration with Intel to extend the companies’ more than two decades of innovation to help customers accelerate the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and enable Private AI everywhere – across data centres, public clouds and Edge environments.
VMware and Intel are working to deliver a jointly validated AI stack that will enable customers to use their existing general-purpose VMware and Intel infrastructure and open-source software to simplify building and deploying AI models. The combination of VMware Cloud Foundation and Intel’s AI software suite, Intel Xeon processors with built-in AI accelerators, and Intel Max Series GPUs, will deliver a validated and benchmarked AI stack for data preparation, model training, fine-tuning and inferencing to accelerate scientific discovery and enrich business and consumer services.
More than 300,000 customers deploy VMware Cloud globally and VMware virtualisation software is deployed nearly everywhere in the enterprise where data is created, processed, or consumed. This makes VMware Cloud a fast means to bring AI-accelerated compute and models to wherever business gets done.
Similarly, Intel offers open, scalable and trusted solutions to hundreds of thousands of customers. The ubiquity of VMware and Intel products in the enterprise is a powerful combination which will increase the accessibility of data science, enable organisations globally to adopt Private AI, an architectural approach that aims to balance the business gains from AI with the practical privacy and compliance needs.
“When it comes to AI, there is no longer any reason to debate trade-offs in choice, privacy and control. Private AI empowers customers with all three, enabling them to accelerate AI adoption while future-proofing their AI infrastructure,” said Chris Wolf, Vice President of VMware AI Labs. “VMware Private AI with Intel will help our mutual customers dramatically increase worker productivity, ignite transformation across major business functions and drive economic impact.”
Sandra Rivera, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center and AI Group (DCAI) at Intel, added: “For decades, Intel and VMware have delivered next-generation data centre-to-cloud capabilities that enable customers to move faster, innovate more and operate efficiently. With the potential of Artificial Intelligence to unlock powerful new possibilities and improve the life of every person on the planet, Intel and VMware are well equipped to lead enterprises into this new era of AI, powered by silicon and software.”
VMware Private AI brings compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed and consumed, whether in a public cloud, enterprise data centre, or at the Edge, in support of traditional AI/ML workloads and Generative AI. VMware and Intel are enabling the fine-tuning of task-specific models in minutes to hours and the inferencing of large language models at faster than human communication using the customer’s private corporate data.
VMware and Intel now make it possible to fine-tune smaller, economical state-of-the-art models which are easier to update and maintain on shared virtual systems, which can then be delivered back to the IT resource pool when the batch AI jobs are complete. Use cases such as AI-assisted code generation, experiential customer service centres recommendation systems and classical machine statistical analytics can now be colocated on the same general-purpose servers running the application.
VMware and Intel are designing a reference architecture that combines Intel’s AI software suite, Intel Xeon processors and data centre GPUs with VMware Cloud Foundation to enable customers to build and deploy private AI models on the infrastructure they have, thereby reducing total cost of ownership and addressing concerns of environmental sustainability.
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