Oct. 22, 2019 — NVIDIA with Microsoft Corp. today announced a technology collaboration focused on intelligent edge computing, designed to help industries better manage and gain insights from the growing flood of data created by retail stores, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, connected buildings, urban infrastructure and other environments.

By enabling closer integration between Microsoft Azure and the NVIDIA EGX platform, the companies are working together to advance edge-to-cloud AI computing capabilities, benefiting businesses worldwide.

The NVIDIA Metropolis video analytics application framework, which runs on EGX, has been optimized to work with Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge, Azure Machine Learning solutions and a new form factor of the Azure Data Box Edge appliance powered by NVIDIA T4 GPUs. Additionally, NVIDIA-certified off-the-shelf servers — optimized to run Azure IoT Edge and ML services — are now available from more than a dozen leading OEMs, including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo.

“The age of intelligent edge computing has arrived. The world’s largest industries want to have AI computing at the edge, to extract insight from continuous streams of data, and to sense, reason and act at the point of action,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “In time, this will be the largest-scale computing ever created, connecting trillions of smart sensors. NVIDIA’s and Microsoft’s platforms dovetail to offer customers an end-to-end solution from edge to cloud.”

“In a world where computing is becoming embedded in every place and every thing, organizations require a distributed computing fabric that spans the cloud and edge,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Together with NVIDIA, we’re bringing the power of Azure and Azure AI to the edge, enabling breakthrough experiences for our customers.”

NVIDIA EGX is a scalable platform that brings AI computing capabilities to the edge, starting with a tiny Jetson Nano and scaling to a rack of T4 servers. It is supported by a complete software stack with CUDA-X libraries, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud solutions such as Azure IoT.

The NVIDIA Metropolis framework includes the NVIDIA DeepStream software developer kit, which has been adopted by 100+ intelligent video analytics software providers. Among these are AnyVision, DeepVision, IronYun, Malong and RealNetworks, which are providing solutions for retail, manufacturing and smart cities.

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning solutions allow businesses to rapidly build AI models at scale, from the cloud to the edge. The Microsoft Azure IoT platform enables applications to run from any NVIDIA-certified server or appliance, and on OEM devices that provide connectivity, scalability and maintainability from the cloud. Azure Data Box Edge is an AI-enabled edge computing appliance that processes and analyzes data at the edge and transfers data to cloud when connected.