VMware announced a collaboration with Intel to deliver a jointly validated AI stack that will enable customers to use their existing general-purpose VMware and Intel infrastructure and open source software to simplify building and deploying AI models. According to the company, the combination of VMware Cloud Foundation and Intel’s AI software suite, Intel Xeon processors with built-in AI accelerators, and Intel Max Series GPUs, will deliver a validated and benchmarked AI stack for data preparation, model training, fine-tuning and inferencing to accelerate scientific discovery and enrich business and consumer services.

VMware Private AI brings compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed, and consumed, whether in a public cloud, enterprise data center, or at the edge, in support of traditional AI/ML workloads and generative AI. VMware and Intel are enabling the fine-tuning of task specific models in minutes to hours and the inferencing of large language models at faster than human communication using the customer’s private corporate data.

VMware and Intel now make it possible to fine-tune smaller, economical state of the art models which are easier to update and maintain on shared virtual systems, which can then be delivered back to the IT resource pool when the batch AI jobs are complete. Use cases such as AI-assisted code generation, experiential customer service centers recommendation systems, and classical machine statistical analytics can now be co-located on the same general purpose servers running the application.

VMware and Intel are designing a reference architecture that combines Intel’s AI software suite, Intel Xeon processors, and Data Center GPUs with VMware Cloud Foundation to enable customers to build and deploy private AI models on the infrastructure they have, thereby reducing total cost of ownership and addressing concerns of environmental sustainability. This VMware Private AI reference architecture with Intel AI will include:

• 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors with Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX)
• Intel Data Center GPU Max
• Intel’s AI software suite packaged with end-to-end open source software and optional licensing components to enable developers to run full AI pipeline workflows from data preparation to fine-tuning to inference.

VMware Private AI will be supported by servers from Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo running 4th Gen Xeon CPUs with Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX) and Intel Max Series GPUs.