Hyperscalers, cloud providers and global enterprises will be the market for Verizon Business’ AI Connect, which was introduced last week. The goal is to enable these organizations to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) workloads at scale. Google Cloud and Meta are among the first users of the service.
Verizon Business says that part of the initiative is to expand its AI ecosystem with partnerships and collaborations with Meta, Google Cloud, GPU-as-a-Service provider Vultr, and NVIDIA. It is unclear if Meta and Google Cloud are users as well as partners and collaborators or the activities are synonymous.
Verizon Business points to the shift of AI to real time decision making, which it says is known as inferencing. This approach to AI will be used by 60% to 70% of workloads by 2030, according to a McKinsey prediction referenced in the announcement. This will drive a “massive” demand for more computing power for low-latency connectivity, compute and security at the edge of the network.
Google Cloud and Meta are among the first users of AI Connect. The press release describes the initiative as a “strategy” and says that it will “power the AI ecosystem with reimagined existing assets integrated in Verizon’s intelligent and programmable network.”
“We are seeing significant demand for reliable network infrastructure that can support existing AI workloads,” Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady said in the announcement. “As the technology evolves, our industry leadership, best-in-class edge-to-cloud connectivity, programmable network and assets will enable us to meet these needs and accelerate innovation.”
In December, Verizon announced a solution developed with NVIDIA that enables a wide range of AI applications to run over Verizon’s reliable 5G private network. The platform consists of Verizon’s 5G Private Network with Enterprise AI and private mobile edge compute and NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise software platform and NIM microservices.
