HPE Enters the AI Cloud Computing Market

HPE CEO Antonio Neri ushered his company into the AI cloud computing market with HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models (LLMs), telling the packed theater during his keynote at the Discover partner conference in Las Vegas that it’s one of the “boldest bets” in the history of the company.

HPE’s Antonio Neri

“AI will be the most disruptive technology of our lifetime, and 2023 will be remembered as a historic technology inflection point. AI has the potential to help solve huge societal challenges ranging from climate change to energy transition to cures for disease,” Neri said. “Combined with automation, AI can drive new levels of productivity and cost savings. Not only can AI help you make better and faster decisions, it helps you predict trends that create new business opportunities. In simple terms, AI creates superpowers for your business.”

AI for All … Eventually

Almost any type of end-user customer can eventually use HPE’s GreenLake LLM platform, which provides AI modeling via on-demand in a multitenant supercomputing cloud server. Part of Neri’s vision is to eventually offer AI supercomputer capabilities to businesses of all sizes, as well as to groups of people or organizations that don’t have the resources to access such expensive and powerful technology.

“As I think about these types of technologies and the requirements of supercomputing, it’s how to make it an inclusive and available tool,” Neri said at a press conference following his keynote. “One of the challenges we have as technologists is that if it’s only available to the few, then we create a massive, massive divide.”

HPE Channel Partners Can Get a Piece of the AI Action

HPE’s channel partners on the GreenLake platform can also resell HPE’s AI solutions.

“This is one of the beauties of our approach,” Neri said. “Solutions integrators, ISPs, distributors and other service providers have not been in a supercomputer space, but now we give them the capability to focus on these applications and sell them just like anything else.”

GreenLake for LLMs runs on an AI-native architecture designed to run a single large-scale AI training and simulation workload at full computing capacity. HPE has partnered with Aleph Alpha, a German AI startup, to initially power applications that require text and image processing and analysis. HPE will develop AI applications on its Frontier supercomputer, built on the HPE Cray EX foundation, which the company bills as being more powerful than the world’s seven next most powerful supercomputer combined. The supercomputer data center is almost 100 percent carbon neutral, Neri said.

HPE’s AI platform includes access to Luminous, Aleph Alpha’s pre-trained large language model that is offered in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages. GreenLake for LLMs allows customers to leverage their own data, and train and fine-tune a customized model, to gain real-time insights based on their proprietary knowledge.

HPE GreenLake for LLMs is scheduled to launch in North America sometime this year and in Europe during the first half of 2024.

Meaningful Applications

The first applications HPE plans to launch includes those that speed up the drug development process to quickly identify viable treatments and deliver more personalized care, advance clean energy technology, predict and prevent catastrophic weather events through digital twin modeling, and improve financial detection to prevent fraud and related losses.

“We believe that the technology will drive a foundational transformation in the IT market on the scale of web 1.0,” said Justin Hotard, HPE’s executive vice president, high performance computing. “By further augmenting AI to train more data and build larger models, we can increase the accuracy of predictions, and solve problems faster to accelerate time to impact and time to value.”