Data center services company Equinix is collaborating with NVIDIA to provide private AI with NVIDIA DGX in a fully managed AI data center solution, both companies announced Wednesday, January 24.
Equinix Private AI with NVIDIA DGX will be available on January 24 in the US and Frankfurt, Germany. Equinix said it will expand to 250 data centers spread across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa “soon.”
Equinix and NVIDIA announce Private AI with NVIDIA DGX solution
The Equinix Private AI solution with NVIDIA DGX is based on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, a supercomputing architecture for building, training, and running generative AI models. It is then combined with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software stack. Equinix provides data center management for Equinix Private AI with NVIDIA DGX.
The new solution will be coordinated through Equinix's managed services team and will be extensible from Equinix's existing multi-cloud offerings.
“What we're seeing is that once customers get started with AI, they continue to scale,” Charlie Boyle, vice president of DGX Systems NVIDIA, told TechRepublic in an email. “With this offering, customers can start at any size and grow with their success.”
New solution aims to help organizations accelerate AI infrastructure
Cost, speed of deployment, and sustainability are among the concerns companies often cite regarding deploying generative AI that NVIDIA and Equinix want to address. The Equinix Private AI solution with NVIDIA DGX is a “turnkey offering for enterprises to get the AI infrastructure they want in a very predictable way and with a short delivery time,” Boyle said, during a preview briefing on the 23rd. from January.
Any data center infrastructure that handles proprietary data fed into generative AI must be scalable, with low throughput and low latency, Boyle said. In essence, customers want to “bring AI closer to data,” he said.
Data security is a barrier to generative AI adoption
Generative AI models have the potential to transform the way organizations do business, but data security is a significant barrier to entry; Companies do not want large language model makers to have access to their proprietary data.
This solution is of particular interest to enterprises due to its position in the wave of custom, proprietary generative AI models for enterprises. Generative AI could be used in healthcare and finance, but both are fields where privacy is incredibly important. Financial services organizations that are already Equinix and NVIDIA customers have been exploring generative AI technology for customer service and fraud detection; in particular, generative AI with augmented recovery is in demand.
Governance, security and certification are among the top customer needs, said Jon Lin, executive vice president and general manager of data center services at Equinix.
Additionally, companies want their data to be up-to-date and not limited by a model formed with publicly available information from a year ago. Equinix Private AI with NVIDIA DGX was created to address those issues and help organizations, especially those already using Equinix or NVIDIA infrastructure, accelerate and simplify the process of creating custom generative AI tools trained on proprietary data.
SEE: Microsoft is doubling its UK AI data center footprint (TechRepublic)
Companies “want to own their own AI future,” Boyle said. “And that largely translates to them wanting to own the models that their business depends on. Whether they want to own the data security model, intellectual property security, auditability, all those aspects.”
Equinix Private AI Competitors with NVIDIA DGX
Other large companies offering generative AI deployment for businesses using private data include cloud services such as Google's Vertex AI Workbench and Google Cloud AI Infrastructure, IBM's watsonx, Microsoft's Azure AI and Amazon's SageMaker, Lambda (which uses NVIDIA DGX) and training platforms for generative AI implementation. provided by organizations such as Hugging Face, MosaicML and Databricks.
