Lenovo and Digital Realty: Bringing AI to Enterprise Data

Lenovo believes the next phase of AI will be about bringing AI to enterprise data, instead of bringing data to AI. In this interview with Flynn Maloy, CMO of Lenovo ISG, you’ll learn about the difference between private AI and hybrid AI and the advantages they offer.

Learn how Lenovo and Digital Realty are partnering to help enterprise IT leaders overcome the challenges of deploying AI infrastructure, addressing requirements for security, sustainability, and advanced cooling methods like liquid cooling that enable high-density workloads.

Watch the video to learn more.

Video Transcript

Flynn Maloy:

Hello, my name is Flynn Maloy. I'm the chief marketing officer of Lenovo ISG, which is the infrastructure business inside of Lenovo.

Lenovo overall is about a $62 billion company. We have a really large PC business. Which is about $40 billion. Everybody knows our brand for that. But in 2016, Lenovo purchased the IBM x86 business. And since that time, has been growing it up to be a $10 billion business today. Number three in servers, number three in AI infrastructure, number four in storage. Altogether, we've got global scale and global reach and that's who we are today.

We're right in the middle of the crazy AI hype cycle that's going on right now. The public cloud companies have grown and driven AI to where it is today and to certain heights coming in the future. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, on our stage back in October, coined this with us that the next phase of AI will be bringing AI out to everyone. You don't have to take your data to the AI, bring the AI to your data.

And that's about private AI.

Whether you're a school, or a hospital, or a retail company, or a manufacturing site, you're going to want to bring the AI out to where it is: for data gravity reasons, for data sovereignty.

Good example, a hospital, right? You've got a private hospital or consortium hospitals. One MRI is 30 gigs and really private. And if you're the radiologist and she wants to get some AI magic upon the MRI, is she going to round trip every MRI up to the public cloud? The better solution is bring the AI to where the hospital is out to the private data center, out to the edge and do it closer where the data is, where the privacy is. And probably that hospital is going to have many workloads that run in the public cloud. But for some of them, like AI, so data intensive, they are going to want a solution that is closer to where it is. That's private AI.

Hybrid is the mix of that.

Enterprises today need to look, what are the workloads, what kind of AI do I want? And then decide, okay, what am I going to run here? And what am I going to run in a private environment? Public versus private. And it's that mix, is what we say: hybrid AI.

AI tech, as we look towards the next generation, we all thought that the technology would get cooler and smaller over time. It's not actually what's happening. It's getting bigger and hotter. And if you look at some of the new processing units or the heat sinks, they're gigantic. And that's because this tech uses so much power.

Lenovo, a pioneer in liquid cooling, either closed loop or open loop, as well as air cooled, but the most advanced power optimization capabilities we can have, but a lot of the data center infrastructure that exists out in the world today, can't handle it, sustainability, power optimization, consolidation.

There's lots of reasons for companies wanting to move out of their private data center. And a lot of times they think, "Oh, you know, I love your stuff, but I need to get out of my DC so I'm moving everything to the public cloud." Which, okay, we sell into the public cloud too. But if you're looking for a private solution, this is where a partnership between Lenovo Digital Realty can really come into play because there's an alternative.

You can have that AI technology you want that doesn't fit in your old data center. You can have it in a modern, sustainable data center. Here's your choices: we can do a pay as you go if you like. And to be able to work together with Digital Realty and take the friction out of how our sales teams work. Some of those tools that I've seen from the team at Digital Realty are very exciting. Indicative pricing, capacity: here it is around the world. A few clicks and you'll be able to communicate to your customer, here's an alternative to moving it to the cloud if you want that private AI or the private solution. Come talk to us.

Come talk to Digital Realty about: are you looking for an inferencing solution? Are you looking for training, retraining, private, LLM? Whatever it is, whatever that AI use case is, come talk to us. We've got solutions that can easily accelerate and help you crystallize what are the outcomes you want to do, what are some of those next steps are. Some of the best tech in the industry landed in some of the best data center infrastructure in the industry.

And together, Lenovo and Digital Realty might have the solution you're looking for.