World Wide Technology commits to AI adoption investment

World Wide Technology has announced plans to invest more than $500M over the next three years in technology, infrastructure and people to help power their clients’ adoption of artificial intelligence solutions at global enterprise scale.

Building on WWT’s investment in the company’s proprietary Advanced Technology Center (ATC) over the past 15 years, this commitment expands the ATC’s formidable capabilities with a lab environment where organizations can try, test and validate AI applications unique to their business needs and use cases.

“AI will be the most impactful and transformational technology of all time, but the complexities of today’s rapidly evolving landscape give organizations more options and risk considerations than ever before,” said Jim Kavanaugh, co-founder and chief executive officer of WWT. “For over a decade, the ATC has helped IT leaders cut technology evaluation time from months to weeks by serving as a testbed for innovation in data management, machine learning and deep learning for traditional AI use cases. As the industry moves toward generative AI, WWT’s investments in the ATC and data expertise are central to helping our clients achieve better business outcomes.”

Demand for generative AI is growing, with more than half of organizations already experimenting with the technology according to a recent study by VentureBeat. To accelerate the adoption of AI solutions at scale, WWT has announced the first of its new composable AI labs launching through early 2024.

Designed to help companies experiment, test and develop custom AI solutions before they invest time, money and resources in new technologies, each first-of-its-kind lab is housed within WWT’s ATC — a virtual and physical data center environment with over 500 racks of the latest equipment from hundreds of the world’s leading hardware and software providers, including AMD, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, Dell, Pure, HPE and NetApp.

“For over 15 years, Intel and WWT have partnered together to align the right hardware and software solutions to drive amazing outcomes for customers. This new and accelerated engagement around AI, and the combined strengths of Intel and WWT, will enable the right fit-for-purpose AI solutions that benefit customers’ unique AI needs — whether in their own data centers, in the cloud, at the edge, or on their PCs,” says Greg Ernst, corporate vice president & GM, Intel Americas Sales & Marketing.

“Generative AI is an engine of growth helping enterprises in every industry explore new opportunities,” said Craig Weinstein, vice president of the Americas Partner Organization at NVIDIA. “WWT’s investment in the ATC, paired with NVIDIA accelerated computing and software, can help customers customize and deploy AI solutions specially tailored to the needs of their industry.”

“Collaborating with solutions providers like WWT will help accelerate the development of AI solutions tailored for diverse client needs across multiple industries,” said Jason Mooneyham, corporate vice president of the Americas Region, AMD. “We are in the very early stages of the AI computing era and believe the work we are doing with WWT can help businesses more rapidly deploy highly performant and highly efficient AI solutions enabled by an open software ecosystem at scale.”

Whether building a computer vision solution for a hospital, an AI-powered data analytics platform for a human resource department, or retail recommendations for an e-commerce site, IT leaders can leverage the AI lab environment to validate the AI experience, test large language models, discover and classify data, test the threat impact, and more.