Lenovo invests $1 billion to advance AI infrastructure solutions

Lenovo has announced plans to invest US$1 billion over three years in the expansion of infrastructure solutions to accelerate the artificial intelligence (AI) deployment for businesses around the world. 

Fuelled by record revenue of over US$2 billion, increased digitalisation, and demand for IT infrastructure upgrades, Lenovo is focused on simplifying the complex implementation of new AI capabilities by delivering AI to the source of data, harnessing its vast network of best-in-class partners to build next-generation turnkey solutions enabling edge intelligence. 

This announcement marks Lenovo's largest AI infrastructure investment in history and will expand the company's industry-leading AI-ready portfolio of smart devices, infrastructure solutions and services to help accelerate innovation, enabling the use of generative AI and delivering cognitive decisions at scale throughout remote locations across financial, manufacturing, healthcare, retail and smart city applications.

Lenovo's investment strategy includes an additional US $100M commitment to the expansion of the Lenovo AI Innovators program. The program has already delivered a record 150+ cutting-edge AI-ready solutions created with 45 leading ISV partners across its end-to-end ecosystem. Developed within just one year of the program's launch, the solutions bring AI from the lab to scale and enable dramatic technology shifts within high-growth sectors. Leveraging AI-ready solutions, customers can more rapidly deploy and leverage cutting-edge AI capabilities, like generative AI, computer vision, prediction, and virtual assistants.

"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," says Sumir Bhatia, President – AP, Lenovo ISG.

"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."

AI Innovators Program - Enabling AI Discovery and Accelerating Adoption

The Lenovo AI Innovators program includes an ecosystem of best-in-class software partners collaborating with Lenovo to provide customers with tailored, proven, and ready-to-deploy AI solutions for their end-to-end operations, including computer vision, audio recognition, prediction, security, and virtual assistants for every industry.

"We believe in the power of collaboration and the strength of partnerships," says Kumar Mitra, Regional General Manager and MD – CAP, Lenovo ISG. 

"Through our expanded AI Innovators program, we are actively seeking to partner with independent software vendors (ISVs) and startups to accelerate the journey of bringing AI innovations from the lab to scale. Together, we aim to unlock new possibilities and drive positive industry transformation."

Across its solutions, Lenovo is helping customers harness the value of their data, deploying AI to transform their business with more predictable outcomes and delivering its AI-ready solutions via TruScale Infrastructure as a Service for ultimate flexibility as the company continues its service-led transformation.

The new Lenovo AI Discover Center of Excellence provides access to Lenovo data scientists, AI architects and engineers to help explore, deploy and scale AI solutions. The service also guides customers to the most appropriate software partners, AI-optimised infrastructure and responsible AI guidance through the Lenovo Responsible AI Committee. As companies learn to deploy AI, the committee helps customers with their approach to designing, deploying, and using AI ethically, helping organisations understand and address privacy, fair usage, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility considerations.

Manu Mehra, MD – ANZ, Lenovo ISG adds, "In the dynamic ANZ market, we recognise the immense potential for AI deployments. Our investments in AI infrastructure are strategically aimed at simplifying complexities amid increasing digitalisation. 

"By partnering with ISVs and startups, we aim to bring cutting-edge AI innovations from the lab to scale." 

AI Solutions by ISV partners

As the retail, food service and hospitality industries adapt to the post-pandemic era, businesses are reimagining front-end and back-end operations to enable improved customer service, mitigate waste and address shifts in the labor market. Lenovo is partnering with DeepBrain AI to offer an end-to-end solution for generative AI virtual assistants that can be paired with powerful large language models (LLMs) to deliver 24/7 automated concierge service in hospitality and retail settings.

As manufacturing operations around the globe seek digitalisation to drive future growth and differentiation amidst economic disruptions, innovative AI solutions from Lenovo and Guise help industrial customers reduce unplanned downtime with up to 14 days of advanced prediction, as well as understand customer behaviour and optimise processes with computer vision, predictive maintenance, and anomaly detection on the production line.

Al Hathboor Bikal.ai and Lenovo are pioneering the service-based rollout of an AI-enabled data centre at Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP) in United Arab Emirates (UAE). Leveraging Lenovo TruScale HPC and AI as a service, the collaboration is providing public and private organisations with the ability to access AI capabilities to support citizen safety and security through digital transformation projects across sectors. Aligning with the UAE Net Zero 2050 policy, the data centre is the first in the region to use industry-leading Lenovo Neptune direct water-cooling to deliver enhanced performance and efficiency while lowering power consumption.

Bringing AI to Wherever Data Resides

As the amount of worldwide data grows exponentially, next-generation infrastructure technologies that deliver data centre-like computing to the edge are critical to empowering AI for improved emergency response, public safety, accessibility, tourism and retail experiences. With more enterprise data being processed outside of the data centre, Lenovo is committed to supporting AI workloads everywhere, ensuring purpose-built performance for remote settings.

"By leveraging AI at the Edge, industries such as retail, financial services, and manufacturing can harness valuable insights and gain a competitive edge. Lenovo, with its expertise and comprehensive AI solutions, is well positioned to help businesses fully leverage the potential of AI and navigate the ever-changing business landscape," Mitra says.

Lenovo extends its comprehensive portfolio of AI-ready infrastructure to over 70 products, with new AI-optimised edge-to-cloud server platforms that help address any AI workload. With emerging innovations like LLM and the continuous expansion of computer vision deployments, more processing power is needed where the data is being generated to run real-time inferencing at the edge.

The new Lenovo ThinkEdge SE360 V2 is the latest purpose-built edge server that delivers more power to enable AI solutions ranging from computer vision, voice AI and generative AI. Whether for a store, factory or office, the new server provides extended accelerated computing supportive of Intel Data Center GPU Flex Series, the NVIDIA AI platform, including NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, as well as  Qualcomm® Cloud AI 100 platforms to enable intense workloads at the source of data creation. The ThinkEdge SE360 V2 delivers the highest GPU density in the smallest form factor available and is at least twice as quiet compared to competitive products, allowing edge AI to be deployed in the most remote and rugged sites.

"This announcement further strengthens our AI portfolio, positioning Lenovo as a trusted partner for businesses. With AI at the Edge, industries such as retail, FSI, and manufacturing can harness valuable insights. Lenovo is well-equipped to help businesses leverage these opportunities and drive transformative growth in the ANZ market," Mehra says.

The new range of AI-ready edge solutions also includes the Lenovo ThinkEdge SE350 V2 for hybrid cloud and modern HCI deployments, offering twice the storage capacity and leveraging the Intel Xeon D processor to help customers run AI while easily consolidating workloads, data backup, collaboration and content delivery in the smallest form factor on the market.

In the data centre, the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 is the most versatile, accelerated computing platform on the market and purpose-built for AI with three server configurations in one, including support for NVIDIA HGX 4-GPU systems, or 4-DW PCle GPU or 8-DW PCle GPU servers in a compact 3U footprint. As fully simulated digital replicas of entire buildings, factories, distribution centres, retail stores or cities, digital twins are combined with AI to generate improved business processes and design outcomes. 

Lenovo is collaborating with NVIDIA on its latest NVIDIA OVX system for building and operating virtual worlds, delivering powerful performance for NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise workloads in the data centre. The ThinkSystem SR675 V3, based on the OVX architecture, features up to eight NVIDIA L40 GPUs to maximise performance and deliver the most advanced ray tracing with RTX-accelerated graphics and AI capabilities in a robust and scalable platform, allowing customers to explore and unlock the full potential of digital twins for businesses of all sizes.

Beyond infrastructure, Lenovo is implementing AI from the pocket to the cloud, with cutting-edge smart devices and solutions, that ensure data science is accessible across all industries in the new hybrid and remote work era. For improved collaboration, new Lenovo ThinkPad commercial laptops include a new Lenovo View application, offering AI-enabled computer vision technology for enhanced video image quality and tools. Lenovo ThinkReality XR solutions help users access immersive simulations, while purpose-built Lenovo ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series Data Science workstations deliver the high-performance necessary for mission-critical AI model development, data prep and training tasks.

With its AI-ready servers, cutting-edge smart devices and ecosystem of leading ISVs, Lenovo will bring pre-validated, performance optimised AI solutions to the source of customer data, even in the most unique edge settings. Together, these advancements serve to simplify the rollout of AI, making it accessible to organisations of all sizes and enabling transformative intelligence across all industries.