VMware teases multi-cloud generative AI offerings for August debut

Data here, model there, Virtzilla’s usual abstraction principles in between

VMware has teased looming announcements outlining how it will enable generative AI to run on its stack, drawing on resources housed across multiple clouds.

Virtzilla's hints appeared in its July 2023 multicloud briefing – a video event staged late last week. During the event, VMware president Sumit Dhawan outlined a strategy to ensure customers can run large language models efficiently in a VMware environment, and to enable fast implementation of the technology.

Much of the strategy outlined in the video is core VMware doctrine – ensuring that consistent policy is applied to resources no matter where they reside across multiple clouds. For AI, that means making it possible to use data from multiple sources securely in a model.

Veep for Cross-Cloud Services Vittorio Viarengo described VMware's intention to deliver "choice of where the data comes from across clouds, choice of where you run your model and your application with high efficiency, but with the control and privacy that enterprise customers require."

Sujata Banerjee, the virty giant's VP of research, mentioned two goals: "How do we run AI workloads on infrastructure, cloud infrastructure efficiently?" and "How do we use AI and machine learning to improve the cloud infrastructure itself so it can have some really nice properties of scalability, automation and so on?"

He also mentioned the possibility of using off-prem accelerators to process on-prem data – an arrangement he said could mean slower processing but would remove the need to move data and therefore bring some benefits.

Also discussed in the vid is a plan for VMware's platform to "enable ecosystem partners – a whole range of ecosystem partners from providers of LLMs to service providers that enable the stack at the enterprise in a quick and rapid fashion."

The remarks appear to be more than kite flying. In the video Dhawan stated "In just few weeks, many of our customers get to see and feel this new technology in their hands."

That timeframe was accompanied by mentions of VMware's annual gabfest, "Explore" – which starts on August 21.

Explore usually features VMware's biggest annual dump of news and strategy updates – but a bigger moment in the history of the corp looms. The FT yesterday reported that the European Commission is due to approve Broadcom's acquisition of the abstraction champion.

The EC has expressed concern that Broadcom could use ownership of VMware to make life hard for rival manufacturers of some networking hardware. Broadcom appears to have satisfied EU regulators that it won't reduce competition, so the deal will be allowed. ®