At its annual VMworld cloud computing conference, VMware (VMW) today announced a partnership with NVIDIA (NVDA -10.01%) that has an ambitious goal: to make artificial intelligence (AI) available to every enterprise, with the help of new data-center, cloud, and edge-computing architecture.
To that end, VMware will adopt NVIDIA's data processing chips and will integrate them across its VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware Tanzu platforms. The company will also customize its offerings to ensure that its software tools work seamlessly with NVIDIA's AI technology, which will result in increased adoption by VMware users.
NVIDIA DGX systems, prpose-built AI supercomputers. Image source: NVIDIA.
Another big goal of this collaboration will be to deploy these AI capabilities wherever the data lives, be it in the cloud, the data center, or at the edge. With its hybrid cloud platform, virtualization capabilities, and portfolio of products and solutions, VMware helps businesses optimize the use of data centers by digitally dividing servers so that companies can pack more applications into the available space.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said, "We are partnering with NVIDIA to bring AI to every enterprise, a true democratization of one of the most powerful technologies." Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, added, "NVIDIA and VMware will help customers transform every enterprise data center into an accelerated AI supercomputer."
This is a big win for NVIDIA. For years, VMware has focused its efforts on creating software and solutions that integrated with central processing units (CPUs) made by Intel (INTC -2.40%), due to its dominant share in the data center market.
With the advent of AI, however, the processor landscape shifted. Parallel processing, or the ability to run multiple complex mathematical calculations simultaneously, made graphics processing units (GPUs) from NVIDIA a staple in cloud computing, AI, and data centers.
