Lenovo reaches $2 billion in AI infrastructure revenue; invests $1 billion to expand AI portfolio
Lenovo announced that it has reached a record annual AI infrastructure revenue of over US$2 billion and is investing an additional US$1 billion to accelerate the deployment of artificial intelligence solutions for businesses worldwide.
The investments by Lenovo and many other companies come amidst a flurry of activity in the wake of ChatGPT’s mainstream success. Lenovo has already been seeing success selling into markets such as retail, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, telecom and other sectors that have been deploying edge AI workloads markets, executives noted in an interview with EdgeIR.
Lenovo’s investment will expand its portfolio of smart devices, infrastructure solutions and services to help enable the use of generative AI and cognitive decisions across financial, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and smart city applications.
Lenovo is investing an additional $100 million to expand its AI Innovators program, which the company says produced over 150 AI solutions with 45 ISV partners in its first year. These new solutions will enable customers to quickly deploy advanced AI capabilities, such as generative AI, computer vision, voice AI and virtual assistants.
“This pivotal investment further expands the development of AI-ready infrastructure solutions that will help customers overcome deployment complexities and more easily implement AI to deliver transformative services and products to the market,” explains Kirk Skaugen, the Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group president.
The Lenovo AI Innovators program is designed to help businesses overcome challenges associated with implementing AI by providing access to software partners, solutions for end-to-end operations and virtual assistants. Lenovo says this allows customers to speed up their adoption of AI technology.
Lenovo is also partnering with DeepBrain AI and Vistry to provide AI-powered solutions to help food service and hospitality businesses adapt to post-pandemic operations. These solutions include virtual assistants for 24/7 automated concierge service and computer vision for improved cook times and food waste reduction. Lenovo claims that these solutions will lead to better customer retention and increased profitability.
Lenovo and Guise have also developed AI solutions to help industrial customers minimize unplanned downtime, understand customer behavior, and enhance processes through predictive maintenance, computer vision and anomaly detection on the production line. These capabilities can estimate up to 14 days in advance, Lenovo says.
Lenovo and Al Hathboor Bikal.ai have partnered to provide AI capabilities to Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP). Organizations in the UAE can use advanced AI features like GPT-3 to enhance safety, education, R&D, retail, and oil & gas sectors. Lenovo Neptune direct water-cooling will be utilized by the AI-enabled data center to improve performance and efficiency and reduce power consumption. Lenovo says these solutions align with the UAE’s Net Zero 2050 policy.
“Al Hathboor sees this collaboration as a way to give the UAE a technological advantage to the innovation ecosystem, create jobs and opportunities for our youth and develop tech for solving regional and global challenges,” says Mohammed Al Hathboor, a management committee member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai.
Further, Lenovo says the new Lenovo AI Discover Center of Excellence offers data scientists, AI architects and engineers to help customers explore, deploy and scale AI solutions. The Responsible AI Committee also guides ethical design, deployment and usage of AI, including considerations such as privacy, fair use, equity and accessibility.
Lenovo says it is committed to bringing AI-ready infrastructure to over 70 products and expanding computer vision deployments, offering more processing power at the edge for real-time inferencing. These solutions allow businesses to use technologies like Large Language Models (LLM) to process data closer to where it’s generated, similar to data center-style computing. This enables improved emergency response, accessibility, public safety, tourism and retail experiences, company executives say.
Lenovo has released a range of AI-ready edge solutions, such as the ThinkEdge SE350 V2 and ThinkSystem SR675 V3, to help customers run AI applications. The SR675 V3 is purpose-built for AI, supporting NVIDIA HGX 4-GPU systems. It features up to eight NVIDIA L40 GPUs for ray tracing and RTX-accelerated graphics. The SE350 V2 offers twice the storage capacity of its predecessor and leverages the Intel Xeon D processor. Both solutions are designed to help customers consolidate workloads, data backup, collaboration and content delivery in a small form factor. Lenovo is also collaborating with NVIDIA on its Omniverse Enterprise workloads for digital twins.
Lenovo has launched two new ThinkPad business laptops with an AI-enabled View application for better collaboration. They have also introduced the ThinkReality XR solutions that offer immersive simulations. Moreover, Lenovo’s ThinkStation and P Series Data Science workstations provide features like AI model development, data preparation and training tasks.
In December last year, EdgeIR interviewed Charles Ferland, Lenovo’s vice president and general manager for edge computing and telecom. The interview provides insight to Lenovo’s views on the market’s evolution and discusses how customers are effectively implementing edge computing solutions.
The complete interview can be viewed on EdgeIR’s YouTube channel and Vimeo channel.
An edited version of the interview is also available on our site.
Article Topics
AI/ML | edge AI | GPU | Industry 4.0 | investment | Lenovo
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