Lenovo is making significant strides to position itself as a key player in the AI revolution from cloud to edge by bringing ‘AI for All’ from ‘pocket to cloud.’ Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) is uniquely positioned to serve cloud and enterprise customers, and the business is approaching $10 billion annually. ISG not only sports a comprehensive portfolio of cutting-edge hardware to power AI-centric cloud to edge infrastructure but also expands vertically with innovative software as well as services from Lenovo’s Solutions & Services Group (SSG).

At the recent Lenovo APAC Analyst Summit in Shanghai, China, Neil Shah, VP of Research at Counterpoint Research, had the opportunity to meet Kamran Amini, VP and GM - Server, Storage & Software Defined Infrastructure at Lenovo ISG, and discuss Lenovo’s strategy, traction, partnerships and offerings to empower cloud and enterprises with innovative AI solutions to succeed in the AI era.

The Interview

Lenovo’s AI Strategy:

• AI adoption is currently driven by cloud service providers with multi-billion parameter GPT-like generative AI models for both training and inferencing.
• Beyond traditional data centers, edge AI use cases such as retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and smart cities are gaining traction.
• Lenovo has over 80 AI-optimized platforms to cater to a wide range of AI workloads and use cases, from edge devices to large-scale language models.
• The internal management and orchestration platform called LiCO eases AI deployment.
• Lenovo also attributes success to its partnerships across the value chain from compute vendors such as NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm to software players such as Microsoft, VMWare, IBM, SAP, Veeam, Red Hat, NetApp and Nutanix, respectively.
• Lenovo has committed to AI investments of more than $2 billion with more than four Global AI innovation centers and 165 AI solutions through Lenovo’s AI Innovators Program.

Key Differentiators:

• AI data centers have a critical challenge with power consumption.
• Lenovo’s Neptune^TM system cooling technology which is in its sixth generation consistently offer significant energy savings as not much air conditioning is needed inside the data center to cool the server.
• Efficient cooling also helps in reducing energy costs by up to 40% in operational expenses.
• Lenovo’s AI solutions offer broad compatibility with Intel and AMD CPUs, and NVIDIA GPUs, including the Grace Hopper and Blackwell making it one of the most comprehensive AI portfolios.
• Targeted partnerships with different players have helped Lenovo build a strong foundation for growth in the infrastructure space and drive differentiation. For example:
  • Partnership with Nutanix and VMware accelerates enterprises’ needs for modernizing IT with Hybrid Cloud via Lenovo ThinAgile HCI solution.
  • Lenovo’s AI Pod, in partnership with NVIDIA and NetApp, aims to offer converged, scalable but simplified infrastructure solutions to help enterprises for GenAI training and inferencing use-cases.
• Lenovo is also offering customers consulting and data science services to support them in their AI journey to effectively build and deploy AI models.
• Lenovo’s AI Innovators program has also been a big differentiator with more than 30,000 partners, 55+ ISVs across 180 countries with more than 165 proven AI solutions building a strong pipeline of customers and solutions. It starts with influencing customers earlier in the buying cycle to help them reduce the complexity and time in developing and deploying AI solutions locally but in a scalable manner.

Analyst Takeaways: 

• It is fascinating to see Lenovo’s progress in the infrastructure domain, offering not only highly integrated end-to-end AI solutions but also a very ‘open’ portfolio with multiple choices for every customer and every scenario.
• A very solution-centric approach built on strong and diverse partnerships and co-innovations has established a strong platform and is a key differentiator for Lenovo to succeed in the AI era.
• Neptune, AI Pod, GPT-in-a-Box are some examples where Lenovo’s AI for All strategy comes into play, developing AI solutions for every customer in the ecosystem.
• Lenovo has performed exceedingly well in the HPC space with AI SuperComputer, leading for more than six years vs HPE.
• One area where we would like to see Lenovo growing would be across Telco Service Providers (TSPs).
• Lenovo’s SSG synergies with ISG will be a key driver for the ISG business in the future, building a strong pipeline of enterprise customers.
• AI hardware gets obsolete faster as AI data models grow. Hence, it would be interesting to see how Lenovo modularizes its solution from an upgradeability perspective or how it repurposes ‘obsolete’ infrastructure as potentially useful infrastructure for smaller or emerging players. The reverse logistics of these systems and solutions will be important from a scalability and sustainability perspective.