Pictured: Justin Boitano, VP/GM Enterprise & Edge Computing, NVIDIA

In a unique industry collaboration, NVIDIA has teamed with VMware to virtualize AI workloads on VMware vSphere using its new AI Enterprise suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks.

The collaboration gives enterprises the software required to develop a broad range of AI solutions, such as advanced diagnostics in healthcare, smart factories for manufacturing, and fraud detection in financial services, the two companies have claimed.

The enterprises that use vSphere for compute virtualization can now support AI with the same tools they use to manage large-scale data centres and hybrid cloud environments. The NVIDIA software adds multi-node AI application performance that aims to be indistinguishable from bare-metal servers.

“Until now, the world has run AI on bare-metal servers,” said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA AI Enterprise enables customers to reduce AI model development time from 80 weeks to just eight weeks, and allows them to deploy and manage advanced AI applications on VMware vSphere with the same scale-out, record-breaking NVIDIA accelerated computing performance that’s possible on bare metal.”

“Every enterprise is exploring how to modernize their infrastructure to meet the demands of AI applications,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. “With NVIDIA AI Enterprise and vSphere 7 Update 2, VMware customers are now able to fast-track AI in their virtualized data centres and easily deploy certified, AI-ready infrastructure for their modern apps.”