IBM Taps New Nvidia AI Data Platform Technologies To Accelerate AI At Scale

IBM has announced new collaborations with Nvidia, including integrations based on the Nvidia AI Data Platform, to help enterprises more effectively put their data to work. The collaborations aim to help build, scale and manage generative AI workloads and agentic AI applications.

As part of that, IBM plans to launch a content-aware storage capability for its hybrid cloud infrastructure offering, IBM Fusion, expand its watsonx integrations, and introduce new IBM Consulting capabilities with Nvidia.

According to a 2024 IBM report, 77% of executives surveyed said generative AI is market-ready, up from just 36% in 2023. With this push to put AI into production comes an increased need for compute and data-intensive technologies.

The collaboration will enable IBM to provide hybrid AI solutions that leverage open technologies and platforms while also supporting data management, performance, security, and governance.

Leveraging the Nvidia AI Data Platform reference architecture, these new solutions are the latest in the collaboration:

Augmenting Unstructured Data Processing: With IBM's new content-aware storage (CAS) capability, enterprises can extract insights from unstructured data, without compromising trust and safety, to responsibly scale and enhance AI applications like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI reasoning. IBM Storage Scale will respond to queries using the extracted and augmented data, speeding up communications between GPUs and storage. CAS will be embedded in the next update of IBM Fusion planned for the second quarter of this year.

More Accessible AI: IBM plans to integrate its watsonx offerings with Nvidia’s to provide access to leading AI models across multiple cloud environments. This will allow organisations to leverage watsonx.ai, IBM's enterprise-grade AI platform and developer studio, to develop and deploy AI models into applications while utilising externally hosted models. 

Support For Compute-Intensive Workloads: IBM Cloud has expanded its Nvidia accelerated computing portfolio by announcing the availability of the H200 Tensor Core GPU instances on IBM Cloud. With its large memory capacity and high bandwidth, the H200 instances are engineered to meet the demands of modern AI workloads and larger foundation models.

Agentic AI: IBM Consulting is introducing AI Integration Services to help enterprises manage processes with agentic AI using Nvidia Blueprints, such as industry-specific workflows that require agentic AI at the edge. Example use cases include autonomous inspection and maintenance in the manufacturing industry or proactive video data analysis and anomaly response in the energy industry.

Optimising Workloads Across Hybrid Cloud: IBM Consulting helps enterprises build and manage compute-intensive AI workloads across hybrid cloud environments leveraging RedHat OpenShift and Nvidia AI. This includes technologies like Nvidia AI Foundry, NeMo, AI Enterprise, Blueprints, and Clara to accelerate high-compute, complex tasks, while managing AI governance, data security and compliance requirements.