Virtualization
Forget the confusing branding and focus on your shrinking token bill
Nvidia has for years advanced the idea of an “AI Factory,” and now its partner VMware has created a product with the same name that does most of the same things, but with one vastly important difference: it uses AMD hardware.VMware was an early supporter of Nvidia in the enterprise and long ago created tools to virtualize GPUs. Nvidia needed that help because its hardware was very expensive even before the generative AI boom, so using virtualization to allow higher utilization rates just made sense. The two companies stayed close and in 2023 combined to announce “VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia”, a bundle that includes the myriad tools needed to run inference workloads, plus tools to help AI departments automate and manage them.“It simplifies Gen AI deployments for enterprises by offering an intuitive automation tool, deep learning VM images, vector database, and GPU monitoring capabilities,” VMware enthused at the time.
A few weeks after the joint announcement, Nvidia started talking about “AI Factories” - essentially a reference architecture that describes all the hardware and software needed to run inference workloads. Nvidia’s AI factories center on its own hardware and software, along with servers from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, and HPE. Those hardware giants brand their implementations “AI factories.”
