The movement of artificial intelligence (AI) to the edge continues with two new collaborations announced this week. One is between AT&T, Cisco, and NVIDIA, and the other teams T-Mobile, Nokia, and NVIDIA.
AT&T, Cisco, and NVIDIA: The platform being developed by the three features AT&T’s dedicated IoT core, Cisco’s Mobile Services Platform and NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure. The goal is to combine intelligent networking, edge AI compute and zero-trust security to enable real-time decision making across distributed, mission-critical environments.
Earlier this month, AT&T discussed its planned investment of more than $250 billion during the next five years.
Use cases include video security, transportation systems, manufacturing and industrial automation, AT&T said in its announcement about the edge AI partnership. The platform also could provide private, policy‑enforced pathways that extend zero‑trust principles from the device through the AT&T network edge and into the cloud.
T-Mobile, Nokia, and NVIDIA: The companies are creating an ecosystem of developers that together aim to provide physical AI applications over distributed edge AI networks. The goal is to illustrate the ability of wireless networks to be a distribution platform for high-performance edge AI computing and enable developers to deploy vision AI agents that use the NVIDIA Metropolis platform to “understand the physical world across cities, utilities and industrial worksites.”
Pilot use cases are smart city operations (LinkerVision, Inchor and Voxelmaps); automated Utility Inspection (Levatas and Skydio); vision-based facility management (Vaidio) and real-time industrial safety (Fogsphere).
NVIDIA is hard at work on the edge. In addition to these two projects, it is working with Comcast on a field trial testing the performance of its 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.
