Lenovo goes big into AI at the edge

Lenovo has announced plans to invest US$1 B over three years to expand infrastructure solutions that accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployment for businesses. Fuelled by revenue of over US$2 B, increased digitalisation, and demand for IT infrastructure upgrades, Lenovo is focused on simplifying the implementation of new AI capabilities.

The announcement marks Lenovo’s largest AI infrastructure investment in history and will expand the company’s 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 across financial, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and smart city applications.

Lenovo’s AI strategy includes delivering AI to the source of data and harnessing its partner network to build turnkey solutions enabling edge intelligence. The company is also committing an additional US$100 M to the Lenovo AI Innovators programme. Lenovo AI Innovators includes an ecosystem of software partners collaborating with Lenovo to provide customers with tailored, proven, and ready-to-deploy AI solutions, covering use cases such as computer vision, audio recognition, prediction, security, and virtual assistants. Within a year of its launch, the programme has already delivered 150+ AI-ready solutions created with 45 ISV partners.

Sumir Bhatia, President – AP, Lenovo ISG, said: “Lenovo's commitment to the future of AI is unwavering. With our largest-ever investment in AI-ready infrastructure solutions, we are empowering our customers to overcome deployment complexities and unlock the full potential of AI, even at the edge. This significant investment not only demonstrates our dedication to being the most trusted partner in our customers' intelligent transformation journey but also fuels innovation in AI technology. We are proud to stand at the forefront of AI infrastructure, providing transformative services and products that shape the future.”

"We believe in the power of collaboration and the strength of partnerships," stated Kumar Mitra, Regional General Manager and MD – CAP, Lenovo ISG.

"Through our expanded AI Innovators programme, we are actively seeking to partner with independent software vendors (ISVs) and startups to accelerate the journey of bringing AI innovations from the lab to scale. Together, we aim to unlock new possibilities and drive positive industry transformation."

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 centre also guides customers to the most appropriate software partners, AI-optimised 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 organisations understand and address privacy, fair usage, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility considerations.

Partnership highlights include:

Lenovo is partnering with DeepBrain AI to offer an end-to-end solution for generative AI virtual assistants that can be paired with large language models (LLMs) to deliver 24x7 automated concierge services in hospitality and retail settings.

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 behaviour and optimise processes with computer vision, predictive maintenance, and anomaly detection on the production line.

Al Hathboor Bikal.ai and Lenovo are pioneering the service-based rollout of an AI-enabled data centre at Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP) in the UAE. Leveraging Lenovo TruScale HPC and AI as a service, the collaboration is providing organisations with the ability to support citizen safety and security with AI. Aligning with the UAE Net Zero 2050 policy, the data centre is the first in the region to use Lenovo Neptune direct water-cooling to deliver enhanced performance and efficiency while lowering power consumption.

“By leveraging AI at the edge, industries such as retail, financial services, and manufacturing can harness valuable insights and gain a competitive edge. Lenovo, with its expertise and comprehensive AI solutions, is well positioned to help businesses fully leverage the potential of AI and navigate the ever-changing business landscape,” Mitra added. The portfolio of AI-ready infrastructure extends to over 70 products, with new AI-optimised 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 a purpose-built edge server that delivers more power. The new server provides extended accelerated computing supportive of Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series, the NVIDIA AI platform, including NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, as well as Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 platforms. 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, Lenovo said.

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 centre, the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 accelerated computing platform is 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 3U footprint.

Lenovo is also collaborating with NVIDIA on its latest NVIDIA OVX system for building and operating virtual worlds, powering NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise workloads in the data centre. The ThinkSystem SR675 V3, based on the OVX architecture, features up to eight NVIDIA L40 GPUs to maximise performance and deliver 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.

Beyond infrastructure, Lenovo is implementing AI from the pocket to the cloud with smart devices and solutions that ensure data science is accessible across all industries. 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 performance necessary for mission-critical AI model development, data prep and training tasks.