Lenovo ups ante on AI infrastructure investments

Lenovo is investing $1bn over three years to expand its infrastructure solutions to support artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in its largest AI infrastructure investment to date.

The move comes at a time when enterprise interest in AI is at an all-time high, fuelled by recent advancements in generative AI and other AI capabilities to improve productivity and automate business processes.

Part of Lenovo’s investment includes an additional $100m to support its AI Innovators programme, which was launched about a year ago for independent software vendors to provide enterprises with AI capabilities such as generative AI, computer vision, prediction and virtual assistants.

Lenovo has also started an AI centre of excellence where Lenovo’s data scientists, AI architects and engineers can help organisations to deploy and scale AI solutions and point them to suitable partners and AI-optimised infrastructure.

At the centre, organisations can also tap the expertise of Lenovo’s responsible AI committee on designing, deploying and using AI ethically to better understand and address privacy, fair usage, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility considerations.

Sumir Bhatia, president for Asia-Pacific at Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions group, 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.”

Like rivals Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo has earmarked edge computing in its AI investment strategy, with more data being processed outside of the datacentre.

To that end, Lenovo has announced new AI-optimised edge computing hardware, such as the ThinkEdge SE360 V2, that is touted to address the compute requirements of a broad range of AI workloads, including real-time inferencing at the edge.

Kumar Mitra, regional general manager and managing director of Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions group in the central Asia-Pacific region, said by leveraging AI at the edge, industries such as retail, financial services and manufacturing can harness valuable insights and gain a competitive edge.

Lenovo has been picking up key AI projects across the globe. It is working with a local partner to roll out an AI-enabled datacentre at the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park in the United Arab Emirates, as well as provide public and private sector organisations with AI capabilities to support citizen safety and security in the country.