NVIDIA and VMware Unlock Generative AI for Enterprises

VMware, Inc. and NVIDIA have announced the expansion of their strategic partnership to ready thousands of enterprises that run on VMware’s cloud infrastructure for the era of generative artificial intelligence.

VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA will enable enterprises to customize models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search and summarization. The platform will be a fully integrated solution featuring generative AI software and accelerated computing from NVIDIA, built on VMware Cloud Foundation and optimized for AI.

“Generative AI and multi-cloud are the perfect match,” says Raghu Raghuram, CEO, VMware. “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.”

“Enterprises everywhere are racing to integrate generative AI into their businesses,” says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “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.”

Full-Stack Computing to Supercharge Generative AI

VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA will enable enterprises to customize large language models; producing more secure and private models for their internal usage; offering generative AI as a service to their users; and more securely running inference workloads at scale, the companies report.

The platform is expected to include integrated AI tools to empower enterprises to run proven models trained on their private data. To be built on VMware Cloud Foundation and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the platform’s expected benefits will include:

• Privacy—To enable customers to run AI services near wherever they have data with an architecture that preserves data privacy and enables secure access.
• Choice—Enterprises can choose where to build and run their models.
• Data-Center Scale—GPU scaling optimizations in virtualized environments will enable AI workloads to scale across up to 16 vGPUs/GPUs in a single virtual machine and across multiple nodes to speed generative AI model fine-tuning and deployment.
• Accelerated Storage—VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture will provide performance-optimized NVMe storage.
• Accelerated Networking—Integration via vSphere and NVIDIA NVSwitch technology will enable multi-GPU models to execute without inter-GPU bottlenecks.

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—that allows enterprises to build, customize and deploy generative AI models virtually anywhere, according to NVIDIA. NeMo combines customization frameworks, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools and pretrained models.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.