Nvidia’s enterprise AI development LaunchPad program goes global

At its ongoing GTC conference, computing giant Nvidia has announced the expansion of its AI LaunchPad program, making it available at 10 locations around the world — Silicon Valley, Dallas, Washington, D.C., London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Initially restricted to Equinix datacenters in North America, LaunchPad gives enterprises immediate access to Nvidia-powered infrastructure and software suite to support their entire AI lifecycle, starting from development to prototyping and testing of workloads.

“The Nvidia LaunchPad program helps enterprises worldwide quickly determine their AI requirements on the same stack they can purchase and deploy, giving them a running start with support from Nvidia before a single server even ships,” Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia, said in a statement.

Netherlands Cancer Institute adopts LaunchPad

Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam is one of the first global organizations to test AI workloads on LaunchPad. As per IDC, by 2025, at least 90% of new enterprise apps will embed AI, and by 2024, more than 50% of user interface interactions will use AI-enabled computer vision, speech, natural language processing, and AR/VR.

The end-to-end LaunchPad solution helps enterprises to this end by providing both the core AI infrastructure — compute, network, and storage — for model training with Nvidia DGX systems as well as inference and AI edge infrastructure with Nvidia-certified systems, built on the Nvidia EGX platform and deployed at Equinix datacenters. Equinix Fabric also provides secure connectivity between these distributed training and inference locations.

In addition to this, LaunchPad provides enterprises the necessary software-based orchestration services to move their data and AI models between the distributed locations. Organizations can manage their AI development workflow with Nvidia Base Command and deployment at the edge with Nvidia Fleet Command. Plus, they can also use the Nvidia Enterprise AI software suite to power enterprise AI workloads in VMware vSphere environments.

“Our Nvidia LaunchPad experience showed that advanced AI workloads can run virtualized on mainstream, accelerated servers with Nvidia AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere, which means that AI-powered breakthroughs in cancer treatment can be more accessible to a broader range of health care providers,” Jonas Teuwen, group leader, AI for Oncology at NKI, said.