IBM and chipmaker NVIDIA have joined forces to push the data center envelope with “supercharged” servers that feature the secret sauce behind how Watson processes information faster than any human.

The pair plans to integrate NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs with the chips powering IBM’s Power line of enterprise servers to accelerate data-intensive workloads such as business intelligence and predictive analytics. The collaboration will move graphics chip “beyond the realm of supercomputing and into the heart of enterprise-scale data centers,” the companies predict, empowering customers to extract insights faster and more efficiently.

Today, only the scientific community has the luxury of using GPUs for non-graphical parallel computing. IBM and NVIDIA are hoping to change that by 2014, when the first next generation Power systems are expected to hit general availability. The machines will ship with Big Blue’s upcoming 12-core Power8 CPU and the Tesla K40, which is billed as the fastest supercomputing chip on the market.

“Companies are looking for new and more efficient ways to drive business value from Big Data and analytics,” said Tom Rosamilia the senior senior vice president of IBM’s Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain organization. “The combination of IBM and NVIDIA processor technologies can provide clients with an advanced and efficient foundation to achieve this goal.”

IBM is tackling both hardware and software on its quest for analytics dominance. Just this month, the vendor augmented its Big Data portfolio with cognitive computing capabilities that enable users to quickly process large volumes of operational data in the cloud. This functionality is available with the newly announced Predictive Insights service, which is complemented by InfoSphere Data Explorer and InfoSphere Data Privacy for Hadoop, a monitoring solution that anonymizes sensitive information to fend off hackers.