Walmart has transformed an ordinary grocery store into a 50,000-square-foot AI lab that tests new retail technologies in a real-world setting. The Intelligent Retail Lab is located in Levittown, New York, and is equipped with AI-powered sensors that keep track of the inventory and the freshness of the produce.

Nvidia has announced the launch of EGX Edge Supercomputing Platform designed to let organisations easily deploy the hardware and software necessary for high-performance, low-latency AI workloads. Instead of being deployed inside big data centres, an EGX deployment is designed to sit at the edge of the cloud which, Nvidia believes, makes it ideal for the next generation of use cases. "We've entered a new era, where billions of always-on IoT sensors will be connected by 5G and processed by AI," Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO, said at a keynote ahead of MWC Los Angeles earlier this week. "Its foundation requires a new class of highly secure, networked computers operated with ease from far away. "We've created the Nvidia EGX Edge Supercomputing Platform for this world, where computing moves beyond personal and beyond the cloud to operate at planetary scale," he added. The EGX stack includes an Nvidia driver, Kubernetes plug-in, Nvidia container runtime, and GPU monitoring tools, delivered through the Nvidia GPU Operator, which allows you to standardise and automate the deployment of all necessary components for provisioning GPU-enabled Kubernetes systems. Nvidia will certify hardware as'NGC Ready for Edge' that customers will be able to buy from partners such as Advantech, Altos Computing, ASRock RACK, Atos, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, GIGABYTE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, MiTAC, QCT, Supermicro, and TYAN. Nvidia says EGX is already being used by customers. At Walmart's Intelligent Retail Lab in Levittown, New York, for example, EGX enables real time processing of more than 1.6 terabytes of data generated each second to "automatically alert associates to restock shelves, open up new checkout lanes, retrieve shopping carts, and ensure product freshness in meat and produce departments." The EGX platform features software to support a wide range of applications, including Nvidia Metropolis, which can be used to power smart cities and build intelligent video analytics applications. The city of Las Vegas, for example, is using EGX to capture vehicle and pedestrian data to make its streets safer. San Francisco's Union Square Business Improvement District is using EGX to capture real-time pedestrian counts for local retailers. "We use our smartphones sporadically -- we type into it, or watch a movie now or then -- and frankly there are only seven and a half billion of us," Huang said. "In the case of sensors, it will be streaming all the time.

Walmart has opened a store in Levittown, N.Y. that is intended to showcase the power of artificial intelligence. The store, announced last week, is packed with video cameras, digital screens, and over 100 servers, making it appear more like a corporate data center than a discount retailer. All that machinery helps Walmart automatically track inventory so that it knows when toilet paper is running low or that milk needs restocking. The company's goal is to create "a glimpse into the future of retail," when computers rather than humans are expected to do a lot of retail's grunt work. Walmart's push into artificial intelligence highlights how retailers are increasingly adding data crunching to their brick and mortar stores.

Walmart isn't going to let Amazon's AI-powered stores go unanswered, although it's not exactly cloning the concept. The big-box chain has unveiled a publicly accessible concept store, the Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL for short), in Levittown, New York. The location uses computer vision and a vast array of cameras not to handle purchases, like Amazon Go does, but to help employees restock empty shelves and corral shopping carts. There are still checkout lines and floor staff, Walmart notes -- this is meant to minimize drudgery for workers and free them for tasks "humans can do best," like helping customers. The retailer is aware of the potential worries about privacy, and is determined to be as open about what's going on as possible.

Walmart this morning unveiled a new "store of the future" and test grounds for emerging technologies, including AI-enabled cameras and interactive displays. The store, a working concept called the Intelligent Retail Lab -- or "IRL" for short -- operates out of a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, N.Y. The store is open to customers and is one of Walmart's busiest Neighborhood Market stores, containing more than 30,000 items, the retailer says, which allows it to test out technology in a real-world environment. Similar to Amazon Go's convenience stores, the store has a suite of cameras mounted in the ceiling. But unlike Amazon Go, which is a grab-and-go store with smaller square footage, Walmart's IRL spans 50,000 square feet of retail space and is staffed by more than 100 employees.

Walmart has a vision for its store of the future. Sure, it includes the kinds of things you'd expect -- clean floors, well-stocked aisles, and plenty of shopping carts at the entrance -- but the remarkable part of this vision is how the retail giant plans to monitor all of those things: using an omnipresent artificial intelligence. In 2017, Walmart launched Kepler, a team focused on reimagining the shopping experience using the latest tech innovations. A small Walmart in Levittown, New York serves as the team's testing laboratory. According to TechCrunch, Kepler's next project will be the creation of a Intelligent Retail Lab right inside the Levittown location.