Server company executives are talking about a turning point in servers and are reporting growth in the need to run AI and machine learning workloads due to artificial intelligence (AI), specifically the hype surrounding generative AI (GenAI) and foundational models.
For accelerating the performance of workloads and GPU-based servers, there seems to be a high demand for high performance computing (HPC) hardware that includes graphics processing units (GPUs).
Many businesses are reluctant to give their company-specific data to AI systems like ChatGPT, which pools data from across the web and open internet. This is the main reason for the growing interest in these specialized servers.
Some businesses are becoming more and more aware that the hyperscalers are behind the curve when it comes to protecting the intellectual property of their GenAI users. This creates opportunities for specialized GPU cloud providers to provide AI acceleration so that users can train basic AI models using their personal data. The significant increase in demand for GPU-equipped servers from the main hardware providers is fueled by the fact that some organizations are also possible to purchase and operate private cloud servers set up as GPU farms for Artificial acceleration.
NVIDIA
In order to provide enterprise computing for GenAI, HPE just announced an expanded proper partnership with Nvidia. According to HPE, businesses of all sizes can quickly customize foundation models using personal data and deploy production applications somewhere thanks to the co-engineered, pre-configured AI tuning and inferencing hardware and software platform. HPE is able to provide GenAI infrastructure with a full-stack AI tuning and inferenceencing system thanks to its partnership with Nvidia.
With the emergence of GenAI, businesses are fast realizing that a fundamentally different approach to technology is necessary to successfully run AI models, according to Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, who spoke about the Nvidia collaboration. He stated that HPE intends to support AI-powered transformation by providing cross cloud, supercomputing, and AI capabilities to its enterprise customers. In order to give its customers the ability to develop AI models properly using their own data, HPE positions the servers it has created with HPE.
Neri views AI as one of the growth engines for the business, according to the company’s fifth quarter earnings call, which was posted on Seeking Alpha. He stated that “over the past few years, we have purposefully aligned our strategy to important market trends related to edge, cross cloud, and AI.” These growth engines are in line with the interests and budgets of our customers who are focusing on IT. We observed continued, albeit inconsistent, demand across our HPE portfolio despite the uncertain economic environment, with a considerable acceleration in Artificial orders. The demand for our Artificial solutions is skyrocketing.
Neri reported that 32 % of total server orders were made up of HPE’s so-called accelerated processing units (APUS). These APUs include GPU-based servers and are made for AI workloads. He continued,” We ended this fiscal year with the largest HPC and AI order book on record, driven by$ 3.6 billion in company-wide APU orders.”
LENOVO
The situation is the same at Lenovo. Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang even talked about the Artificial opportunity during the company’s second quarter 2023–2024 filing. ” Across the technology sector, we saw evident signs of recovery last quarter despite mega challenges. We will use our full-stack AI capabilities from pocket to cloud to enable cross AI applications for every enterprise and every individual, eventually driving green growth for our business, as we continue to carry out our smart transformation strategy and strengthen our Iot ecosystem and partnership.
In an effort to make it simpler for businesses to deploy customized GenAI applications, Nvidia and Lenovo unveiled integrated systems for AI-powered computing in October. For what the company refers to as” secure, supported, and steady production AI,” these Lenovo servers that are powered by Nvidia have been optimized to run the software known by that name. The Nvidia NeMo framework, which Lenovo claimed enables businesses to customize enterprise-grade huge language models, is a part of the software side and is offered on Nwidia AI Foundations. Enterprises can create conceptual AI applications with their special business data, which are optimized for production and run on Lenovo cross AI solutions, using the most recent retrieval-augmented generation technique and fine-tuning methods, according to Lenovo.
The Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 server is a part of the server line-up and is equipped with Nvidia Spectrum- X networking, L40S GPUs, and BlueField-3 DPUs.
DELL
Dell has even seen a rise in demand for servers that are AI-optimized. Chief Operating Officer Jeffery Clarke stated in a transcript of the earnings call for the company’s second quarter economic results that” AI continues to dominate the technology in business conversation” and that customers all over the world are looking into ways to use GenAI to significantly advance their businesses. The CEO and board levels are in charge of these Artificial initiatives.
Sales of Dell servers with AI optimization have increased as a result. According to Clarke, strong demand from AI-focused cloud service providers and rising interest from other customer verticals accounted for a third (33 %) of total server orders revenue in Q3. With a multi-billion dollar sales pipeline, including rising interest across all regions, our AI-optimized server backlog almost doubled compared to the end of Q2, he continued.
Dell even provides a Validated Design for Generative AI with Nvidia, according to the company. According to Dell, its strategy aims to provide best practices for fine-tuning and customizing GenAI models based on desired results while assisting in the security and on-premises maintenance of data. According to the company, its flexible customisation blueprint gives organizations a variety of options for customizing GenAI models to carry out particular tasks using their proprietary data.
These three main PC server manufacturers ‘ new order growth is a sign of the trend among IT buyers to shift spending to hardware that is AI-optimized. It’s very possible that this trend will continue as AI initiatives start to spread.
