Today, Lenovo announced it has reached record annual AI infrastructure revenue of over US$2 billion and unveiled the next phase of its growth strategy, with an additional US$1 billion investment over three years to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployment for businesses around the world. Fueled by increased global digitalization and demand for IT infrastructure upgrades, Lenovo is simplifying the often-complex implementation of new AI capabilities by delivering AI to the source of data and harnessing its vast network of best-in-class partners to build next-generation turnkey solutions that enable computing intelligence directly at the edge. The investment will further expand the company’s industry-leading AI-ready portfolio of smart devices, infrastructure solutions and services to help accelerate innovation, enabling the use of generative AI and delivering cognitive decisions at scale throughout remote locations across financial, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and smart city applications.
As part of the additional investment, Lenovo is committing US$100 million to grow the Lenovo AI Innovators program, which has delivered a record 150+ cutting edge AI solutions created with 45 leading ISV partners in the program’s first year. Leveraging the AI Innovators end-to-end ecosystem, the new solutions are bringing AI from the lab to scale and enabling the dramatic technology shifts underway within high-growth sectors. With the new solutions, customers can more rapidly deploy and leverage cutting-edge AI capabilities, like generative AI, computer vision, voice AI and virtual assistants.
“Building on our more than 150 AI solutions, this pivotal investment further expands the development of AI-ready infrastructure solutions that will help customers overcome deployment complexities and more easily implement AI to deliver transformative services and products to the market,” said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. “As we continue our path to become the world’s largest end-to-end infrastructure solutions provider, Lenovo is committed to being the most trusted partner and empowering our customers’ intelligent transformation by bringing AI to the source of their data, at the edge.”
Enabling AI Discovery and Accelerating Adoption
AI is driving a new wave of opportunities for businesses, but many companies face implementation challenges due to resource limitations and infrastructure complexities, stalling its rollout. The Lenovo AI Innovators program includes an ecosystem of best-in-class software partners collaborating with Lenovo to provide customers with tailored, proven and ready-to-deploy AI solutions for their end-to-end operations, including computer vision, audio recognition, prediction, security, and virtual assistants for every industry.
Lenovo is helping customers harness the value of their data, deploying purpose-built, AI solutions to transform their business with more predictable outcomes. These include NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform to deliver the fastest time to solution across customer industry verticals at the lowest total cost of ownership. As the retail, food service and hospitality industries adapt to the post-pandemic era, businesses are reimagining front-end and back-end operations to enable improved customer service, mitigate waste and address shifts in the labor market. Lenovo is partnering with DeepBrain AI to offer an end-to-end solution for generative AI virtual assistants that can be paired with powerful large language models (LLMs) to deliver 24/7 automated concierge service in hospitality and retail settings. With Lenovo and Vistry, quick service restaurants around the globe use computer vision to automate cook times and help predict supply quantities to prevent food waste, ensuring quality standards while helping improve customer retention and profitability.
As manufacturing operations around the globe seek digitalization to drive future growth and differentiation amidst economic disruptions, innovative AI solutions from Lenovo and Guise help industrial customers reduce unplanned downtime with up to 14 days of advanced prediction, as well as understand customer behavior and optimize processes with computer vision, predictive maintenance, and anomaly detection on the production line.
Lenovo is also delivering its AI solutions via TruScale Infrastructure as a Service for ultimate flexibility as the company continues its service-led transformation. AI Innovators partner, Al Hathboor Bikal.ai and Lenovo are pioneering the service-based rollout of an AI-enabled data center at Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Leveraging Lenovo TruScale HPC and AI as a service, the collaboration is providing public and private organizations with the ability to access AI capabilities to support citizen safety and security through digital transformation projects across education, R&D, retail, oil & gas sectors. The AI-enabled data center’s computing resources will also help organizations bring the benefits of advanced AI features, like GPT-3 to their own operations. Designed to align with the UAE Net Zero 2050 policy, the data center is the first in the region to use industry-leading Lenovo Neptune direct water-cooling to deliver enhanced performance and efficiency while lowering power consumption.
“Al Hathboor sees this collaboration as a way to give the UAE a technological advantage to the innovation ecosystem, create jobs and opportunities for our youth and develop tech for solving regional and global challenges. Lenovo, NVIDIA AI and Intel with SRTIP gives us a joint capability in tech transfer and we look forward to working with our universities, businesses, and government,” said Mohammed Al Hathboor, Management Committee Member of Al Hathboor Bikal.ai.
The new Lenovo AI Discover Center of Excellence provides access to Lenovo data scientists, AI architects and engineers to help explore, deploy and scale AI solutions. The service also guides customers to the most appropriate software partners, AI-optimized infrastructure and responsible AI guidance through the Lenovo Responsible AI Committee. As companies learn to deploy AI, the committee helps customers with their approach to designing, deploying, and using AI ethically, helping organizations understand and address privacy, fair usage, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility considerations.
Bringing AI to Your Data
As the amount of worldwide data grows exponentially, next-generation infrastructure technologies that deliver data center-like computing to the edge are critical to empowering AI for improved emergency response, public safety, accessibility, tourism and retail experiences. With more enterprise data being processed outside of the data center, Lenovo is committed to supporting AI workloads everywhere, ensuring purpose-built performance for remote settings.
Today, Lenovo extends its comprehensive portfolio of AI-ready infrastructure to over 70 products, with new AI-optimized edge-to-cloud server platforms that help address any AI workload. With emerging innovations like LLM and the continuous expansion of computer vision deployments, more processing power is needed where the data is being generated to run real-time inferencing at the edge.
The new Lenovo ThinkEdge SE360 V2 is the latest purpose-built edge server that delivers more power to enable AI solutions ranging from computer vision, voice AI and generative AI. Whether for a store, factory or office, the new server provides extended accelerated computing supportive of Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series, the NVIDIA AI platform, including NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, as well as Qualcomm® Cloud AI 100 platforms to enable intense workloads at the source of data creation. The ThinkEdge SE360 V2 delivers the highest GPU density in the smallest form factor available and is at least twice as quiet compared to competitive products, allowing edge AI to be deployed in the most remote and rugged sites.
The new range of AI-ready edge solutions also includes the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE350 V2 for hybrid cloud and modern HCI deployments, offering twice the storage capacity and leveraging the Intel Xeon® D processor to help customers run AI while easily consolidating workloads, data backup, collaboration and content delivery in the smallest form factor on the market.
In the data center, the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 is the most versatile, accelerated computing platform on the market and purpose-built for AI with three server configurations in one, including support for NVIDIA HGX 4-GPU systems, or 4-DW PCle GPU or 8-DW PCle GPU servers in a compact 3U footprint. As fully simulated digital replicas of entire buildings, factories, distribution centers, retail stores or cities, digital twins are combined with AI to generate improved business processes and design outcomes. Lenovo is collaborating with NVIDIA on its latest NVIDIA OVX system for building and operating virtual worlds, delivering powerful performance for NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise workloads in the data center. The ThinkSystem SR675 V3, based on the OVX architecture, features up to eight NVIDIA L40 GPUs to maximize performance and deliver the most advanced ray tracing with RTX-accelerated graphics and AI capabilities in a robust and scalable platform, allowing customers to explore and unlock the full potential of digital twins for businesses of all sizes.
Beyond infrastructure, Lenovo is implementing AI from the pocket to the cloud, with cutting-edge smart devices and solutions, that ensure data science is accessible across all industries in the new hybrid and remote work era. For improved collaboration, new Lenovo ThinkPad commercial laptops include a new Lenovo View application, offering AI-enabled computer vision technology for enhanced video image quality and tools. Lenovo ThinkReality XR solutions help users access immersive simulations, while purpose-built Lenovo ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series Data Science workstations deliver the high-performance necessary for mission-critical AI model development, data prep and training tasks.
With its AI-ready servers, cutting-edge smart devices and ecosystem of leading ISVs, Lenovo will bring pre-validated, performance optimized AI solutions to the source of customer data, even in the most unique edge settings. Together, these advancements serve to simplify the rollout of AI, making it accessible to organizations of all sizes and enabling transformative intelligence across all industries.
