Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. chose to deliver its HPE Discover keynote session today at the Sphere in Las Vegas, reputedly the largest spherical structure in the world. Perhaps mindful of the setting, HPE’s chief executive seized the moment to have a conversation onstage about the biggest topic of the moment in the tech world – artificial intelligence – with the CEO of what has arguably become the most influential company in AI.

“What’s going on in the industry today hasn’t happened in 60 years,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Corp., said during his keynote conversation with Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “You must find a way to turn that flywheel of your company’s experience into AI. The era of generative AI is here.”

Enterprise systems optimized for AI

Part of the reason for Huang’s personal visit to the Sphere in Las Vegas was that his firm participated in a set of joint announcements Tuesday around AI with HPE. The two companies unveiled a lineup of co-developed systems optimized for AI.

This included HPE Private Cloud AI, an integration between Nvidia AI computing and software with HPE’s own AI storage and compute offerings via GreenLake. Today, Neri described this as a “first of its kind” turnkey private cloud solution.

“We deliver this as one integrated product,” Neri said. “It is ready to run out of the box.”

HPE also announced a set of AI-optimized servers with Nvidia’s latest GPUs and a portfolio of new AI solutions and joint go-to-market integrations. “We are not just witnessing the future, we’re shipping it with AI,” Neri said.

Shipping the future with AI is part of what Huang described as a melding of three key stacks: model technology, data and the computing to process all of it. Nvidia’s CEO believes that Tuesday’s releases represent a step forward in bringing all three elements into play.

“Each one of those stacks is incredibly complicated,” Huang said. “Between our two companies we’ve turned these three stacks into deployable solutions that you can engage right away.”

Producing intelligence at scale

Huang chose his appearance with Neri to offer a perspective on the broader forces at work as generative AI continues to make a significant impact on IT. In his view of the computing world, AI is fueling a significant change in the IT ecosystem, a move beyond “invisible” software that runs enterprises to something much more intelligent.

“A whole new industry has emerged — now we have a new idea,” Huang said. “What is being manufactured is still invisible, but it is embedded with intelligence. We have this new industry that’s emerged called AI factories, where we are producing intelligence at high volume.”

HPE’s announcements this week are also designed to complement the company’s GreenLake portfolio of cloud and as-a-service options. HPE’s AI Essentials software package provides a set of curated AI and data foundation tools and an on-premises alternative to model training in the cloud. The stack includes HPE GreenLake File Storage, ProLiant servers and Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking.

“AI is a transformational workload for GreenLake,” Fidelma Russo, executive vice president and general manager for Hybrid Cloud and chief technology officer for HPE, said during a media briefing prior to the keynote. “Workloads move to the data and not the other way around. Every discussion with our customers starts around data and what they are going to do with data.”

That focus on data was a running theme throughout the announcements. Both companies see corporate data as the driving force behind bringing generative AI to the enterprise.

“You are sitting on a mountain of really valuable data,” Huang said. “The thing we’re trying to do at our companies is turn our corporate intelligence into digital intelligence. All of that is possible because of the things we are doing today. We’re going to make it possible for the first time to bring generative AI to every single company in the world.”

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE