NVIDIA and Equinix partner to develop AI data center infrastructure.

Nvidia is partnering with data center giant Equinix to offer Equinix Private AI with Nvidia DGX, a turnkey solution designed for companies seeking to adopt generative AI without the necessary data center infrastructure and expertise. Under this arrangement, Equinix hosts and manages Nvidia DGX supercomputers purchased by businesses through a standard colocation agreement adapted for GPU clusters rather than traditional x86 servers. These systems start at six figures and can reach millions of dollars in cost.

The solution targets enterprises that prioritize keeping their data outside the public cloud for reasons including security, data sovereignty, and auditability. Charlie Boyle, vice president of DGX systems at Nvidia, explained that many enterprises lack the expertise to build these highly complex clusters of systems. "Most enterprise companies are sitting on a massive amount of enterprise data, sometimes decades of data," he noted. "And all that data needs to be very close to the AI processing that they're trying to accomplish." The barriers to AI adoption remain significant: the ramp to AI is steep and expensive, and qualified talent is scarce.

Equinix, one of the world's largest data center providers operating 250 facilities in 71 metropolitan areas, offers this as a fully managed service. John Lin, executive vice president and general manager of data center services at Equinix, stated that "many customers have the desire to have this capability within their company" and emphasized that "customers can really reduce their time, from the moment that they have the idea that they want this AI infrastructure, to the time that they actually get it up and running."

Equinix's Private AI service provides either Nvidia's DGX BasePod or SuperPod cluster configurations, with the BasePod starting at eight DGX H100 GPUs and the SuperPod comprising 128 DGX H100 systems. The systems are connected via Nvidia's ultra-low latency InfiniBand networking technology and managed by Equinix's managed services team. The offering includes Nvidia's AI Enterprise platform, which provides pretrained models, optimized frameworks, and accelerated data science software libraries for building LLMs. Equinix's data centers connect through a high-speed private network and offer high-speed interconnections to leading cloud services and enterprise service providers. The service is available today.