Microsoft And NVIDIA Announce HGX-1 Platform Standard For AI/ML Cloud Computing

NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn) announced today their plans for HGX-1, a hyperscale GPU accelerator for AI and cloud computing. This open-source design is being released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus initiative at the OCP (Open Compute Project) conference and is designed to give hyperscale datacenters a high performance and flexible path for the machine learning industry. I see this release part of a larger narrative for NVIDIA, which has truly been seeing incredible momentum in cloud/hyperscale over the past year--their Tesla business tripled (yes, tripled) last year. The compute model is changing, and machine learning training currently favors GPU computing--NVIDIA's bread and butter. HGX-1 is a component of Microsoft's Project Olympus contribution to OCP, which, for those who are unfamiliar, is a consortium that is seeking to speed up the pace of innovation by applying the benefits of open source to hardware, which then opens up the design to the OCP community so it can easily be built and deployed.