Comcast and NVIDIA are working at the edge. The cable company announced today that the two will run a field trial that tests the performance of NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs) at regional facilities milliseconds away from its customers.
The goal is to implement artificial intelligence (AI) inference — the ability of machine learning to apply recently gained insights to new data — with what Comcast says is “significantly reduced” latency, power consumption, and cost. The press release says that Comcast will support this goal by levering its DOCSIS 4.0 FDX nodes, smart amplifiers and intelligent gateways.
“The industry is shifting towards a more distributed AI infrastructure and Comcast operates a network that supports it today,” Comcast Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi said in a press release about the NVIDIA partnership.
“NVIDIA AI Grid vision requires intelligent infrastructure that reaches all the way to the customer’s doorstep. By bringing NVIDIA GPUs directly into our edge cloud, we can explore what becomes possible when AI inference happens only milliseconds from end users.”
The companies will start with three use cases:
- Personalized advertising agent: An advanced ad-delivery engine powered by Decart real-time AI video models.
- Small business concierge agent: This use case will leverage Personal AI’s small language model (SLM) and memory platform deployed on HPE ProLiant servers to deliver an AI-powered “front desk” service.
- Reducing latency for gaming: Delivering ultra-low latency streaming for online gaming. The AI Grid brings GPU resources physically closer to players.
Three bits of news last month with echoes of the Comcast/NVIDIA partnership — and all within a week of each other — suggests how fast technology is evolving:
- T-Mobile launched an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platform into a wireless network. The company says that embedding the technology directly into the network enables it to provide new AI-based capabilities to. The first such capability is T-Mobile’s Live Translation, a network-integrated service that provides real-time translation in more than 50 languages during phone calls.
- Quantum computing software firm Classiq, Comcast, and chipmaker AMD said they have completed a trial in which quantum algorithms are used to “supercharge” network routing resilience. The goal of the trial was to see if quantum techniques are useful for finding independent backup paths if a second network site fails after the first is taken offline for maintenance.
- NVIDIA released a report that found that network automation has become the top use case for AI among telecommunications companies. The report also found that integration of generative AI and agentic AI will drive return on investment.
