Introduction
The AI Imperative: From customer experiences to board level directives
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers unprecedented potential to transform industries and is permeating all levels of business operations—from customers expecting new experiences to board-level initiatives.
Gartner reports that 62% of CFOs and 58% of CEOs believe AI will significantly impact their businesses within the next three years. With this focus, investment in AI has accelerated as organizations seek to keep pace and remain competitive. By 2028, global spending on AI, including generative AI, is projected to reach $632 billion, growing at a 29% annual rate, according to IDC.
The foundation of AI, notably generative AI, starts with the deployment of GPU-accelerated, high-performance computing infrastructure. For many organizations, designing, building, and operating AI clusters is the crucial first step in the AI journey. This initial AI infrastructure deployment process often plays the most critical role in dictating the long-term success of an organization’s AI strategy. At the same time, AI infrastructure introduces a level of complexity that traditional IT and operations teams have not faced previously, requiring organizations to balance speed and investment with ability to execute.
In the race to realize AI’s value, organizations must get the design, build, deploy, and manage process right. This eBook provides the topline on deploying AI infrastructure to meet corporate AI initiatives.
AI Factories are the Foundation
The objective for many organizations is to develop an AI factory. An AI factory is a purpose-built infrastructure and operating model that runs at peak performance and streamlines the entire AI lifecycle, from data ingestion and model training to deployment, inferencing, and continuous optimization. This allows organizations to deliver AI capabilities at scale across the enterprise, supporting both internal teams and external customers.
In pragmatic terms, the area of the AI factory that garners the most investment attention is the specialized hardware—GPU-accelerated infrastructure, high-performance parallelized storage, and high-bandwidth connectivity integrated into a unified, high-performance computing asset. AI factories integrate powerful hardware, advanced software, and scalable processes to enable businesses to drive innovation and efficiency through model development for generative AI.
The state of generative AI
McKinsey & Company estimates generative AI could contribute up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy, with nearly two-thirds of businesses using GenAI across multiple business units (Gartner).
Top use cases include customer operations, software engineering, marketing, and research & development (R&D). From banking and high tech to life sciences, retail, and consumer goods, generative AI is transforming industries by streamlining processes, personalizing experiences, and driving innovation. In life sciences, for instance, the NVIDIA® BioNeMo platform demonstrates this potential by using generative AI to accelerate drug discovery and development.
Generative AI has the potential to change the anatomy of work, augmenting the capabilities of individual workers by automating some of their activities.
The Strategic Value of an AI Factory
Investing in an AI factory is not just about adopting cutting-edge technology. It is a strategic move to drive efficiency and innovation as well as secure a competitive edge.
With high-performance, scalable infrastructure and advanced AI capabilities, organizations can:
Reduce operational costs
Streamlined processes and optimized resource utilization reduce day-to-day operating costs while maximizing the impact of AI investments.
Deliver actionable insights
AI-driven analytics find patterns and trends, enabling smarter, faster decision-making.
Accelerate time-to-value
Rapid development and deployment of AI factories help organizations realize ROI faster by delivering actionable insights and results sooner.
Provide new opportunities for growth
Advanced AI capabilities open doors to new business models, products, and revenue streams.
Improve productivity
Automation and intelligent workflows free up teams to focus on other high-value tasks, improving efficiency.
Enhance quality control
AI-accelerated monitoring and analysis improve consistency, reduce errors, and elevate product and service quality.
Infrastructure Essentials for AI Factories
Establishing a robust AI environment requires thoughtful design of hardware, networking, storage, and data management for long-term scalability, performance, and management.
A scalable approach to building an AI factory enables organizations to expand as workloads grow. This “right-sizes” upfront costs while ensuring seamless integration of additional resources. Whether deploying a single AI model or running an enterprise-scale AI factory, starting with the right infrastructure is required for efficient operations and long-term success.
NVIDIA GPU servers provide the computing foundation of Penguin Solutions® OriginAI® AI factory architectures. OriginAI offers a range of NVIDIA-based solutions, including H100, H200, and B200 GPUs and HGX/DGX platforms. Using Penguin Solutions’ pre-configured, validated, and tested AI infrastructure solution, organizations are able to deploy AI factory infrastructure faster and more reliably to accelerate time-to-value.
Infrastructure Essentials for AI Factories
To achieve sustained success, an AI factory must integrate critical infrastructure components. It’s essential to leverage a proven, best-fit architecture—spanning compute, networking, storage, and software—to support scalable and efficient AI operations.
Compute GPUs for optimized AI performance.
Networking (Compute & Storage)
Low-latency, high bandwidth interconnects for efficient data transfer.
Storage
Scalable systems to handle large amounts of data.
Infrastructure Software
Intelligent cluster management software.
End-to-End Services
Full set of end-to-end services including complete 24/7 support.
NVIDIA-certified professional and managed service and support offerings.
Together, these critical components support every phase of an AI infrastructure build out—from initial design, deployment, and workload optimization to ongoing maintenance and scaling. This results in key business outcomes, such as faster time to value, reduced operational overhead, and infrastructure resilience.
InfiniBand Ethernet
ICE ClusterWareTM
Building an AI Factory
Building an AI factory requires expertise that extends beyond traditional IT capabilities. Organizations must plan for the convergence of specialized skills and cross-functional collaboration and mitigate risk by engaging proven experts rather than absorbing the cost of inexperience.
AI factory success involves addressing both technical and organizational complexities, including:
Cross-functional alignment
Infrastructure capabilities
Performance optimization
Data science proficiency
Scalability and reliability
Machine learning operations (MLOPs) expertise
Cost management and control
Data management expertise
AI Factory Practical Considerations
Risks and challenges
Organizations embarking on AI and accelerated computing deployments encounter enterprise-level challenges that span solution design to ongoing management.
1.Complex AI cluster design
AI clusters are highly intricate and far beyond setting up traditional IT architectures. Organizations must validate specialized rack, row, and cluster architectures designed for the most data intensive workloads. They must also integrate diverse network technologies and optimize for power and thermal constraints within data centers. It’s essential for organizations to have a functional, proven design for AI infrastructure to meet the precise needs of the environment.
2.Hyperdimensional system integration
Unified, high-performance AI ecosystems rely on racks and clusters that can be scaled up to thousands of nodes without sacrificing data flow performance. This takes proven network topologies, extensive physical cabling, pre-production testing and validation, and hands-on experience to ensure seamless cluster integration and optimal performance before deployment.
3.Seamless operations at scale
Managing data pipelines and controlling data flows is critical to ensuring AI deployments can scale seamlessly. Within the constraints of today’s IT environments, organizations require automation at scale. Intelligent, purpose-built infrastructure management software is essential for day-to-day operation and maintenance, diagnosis and resolution of cluster performance issues, and optimization of AI clusters and workloads in production. Talent shortages often exacerbate this challenge, as skilled workers essential to successful scaling are in short supply.
4.Continuous GPU/node availability
Ensuring GPU and node availability involves addressing specialty components with unique failure signatures, automating health and performance checks across critical components, and establishing predictive and prescriptive maintenance.
Building an AI Factory with Penguin Solutions & NVIDIA
Building and managing large-scale AI factories demands expert design, robust infrastructure, and proven performance. Penguin Solutions and NVIDIA are helping enterprises de-risk these investments through a powerful combination of NVIDIA’s cutting-edge GPUs and platforms, and Penguin Solutions OriginAI infrastructure solution and ICE ClusterWare™ software—designed to simplify and accelerate AI deployment, management, and scalability.
With features like observability, rapid deployment, and role-based access control (RBAC), OriginAI helps enterprises achieve faster time to value, reduce operational overhead, and build infrastructure resilience.
As the engine of AI, NVIDIA’s GPUs and GPU platforms provide the most advanced processing, system design, and application development for the AI factories of the future. Penguin Solutions applies more than 25 years of HPC experience, close to 90,000 GPUs deployed and managed, and over 2.3 billion hours of GPU runtime to operationalize the use of AI across industries.
Together, these solutions empower organizations to build scalable, efficient, and high-performing AI factories.
NVIDIA excels in accelerating AI factories
When a large social technology company needed a cutting-edge AI platform to power critical research efforts, it partnered with Penguin Solutions and NVIDIA to create innovative solutions.
A large AI supercluster became the most advanced NVIDIA-accelerated AI platform of its kind. Featuring over 40,000 interconnects linking GPUs for large-scale workloads, setting new benchmarks for AI performance. Capable of quintillions of operations per second, it is now recognized as the fastest AI factory in the world.
The solution included:
•16,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs
•500 petabytes of storage
•200 Gb/s HDR InfiniBand per GPU
•5 exaFLOPS of mixed precision compute
Design, Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Factories at Scale
Penguin Solutions OriginAI simplifies the design, build, deployment, and management of AI factories with a portfolio of pre-configured, validated, and tested AI infrastructure architectures.
Backed by Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare intuitive cluster management software and expert services, OriginAI offers organizations a powerful solution to rapidly deploy AI infrastructure at scale—from hundreds to tens of thousands of GPUs.
Design, Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Factories at Scale
Design
With more than 25 years in high-performance computing and experience designing and building supercomputers for large AI clusters since 2017, Penguin Solutions collaborates closely with customers to design AI infrastructures tailored to specific workloads. By leveraging best practices and advanced technologies, Penguin Solutions helps customers meet the precise needs of their environment. Additionally, utilizing NVIDIA’s proven high-performance GPU systems alongside Penguin Solutions' deep operational design expertise de-risks investment and drives optimal performance.
Build
Together Penguin Solutions and NVIDIA are building some of the largest clusters in the world and have become the partners of choice for computing, networking, and critical hardware. Penguin Solutions’ build process ensures that AI infrastructure is fully assembled, tested, and validated. This includes in-factory burn-in testing and performance validation to minimize setup time and optimize reliability upon delivery—ultimately speeding deployment and boosting user productivity.
Design, Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Factories at Scale
Penguin Solutions’ deployment services ensure that AI infrastructure—including the roll out, integration, and validation of NVIDIA hardware—is operational and optimized quickly, providing full support to maximize performance and minimize time to productivity.
Penguin Solutions’ managed services provide continuous, proactive support to ensure that AI infrastructure remains fully operational, scalable, and optimized. This allows organizations to focus on AI innovation rather than infrastructure concerns. As an NVIDIA DGX-ready managed services provider, Penguin Solutions offers deep expertise in managing high-performance AI environments, helping businesses operate their AI factories from day one. This includes support for cloud services that enable elastic burst capacity and provide guardrails to optimize cloud consumption costs.
Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare intelligent management software, along with the ICE ClusterWare AIM™ service, adds another layer of efficiency. Together, they help organizations streamline daily operations, improve infrastructure availability, and maximize production value and return on investment. Manage
Design, Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Factories at Scale
OriginAI: A complete solution for AI infrastructure
OriginAI integrates modular hardware, validated configurations, intelligent software, and expert services to accelerate AI infrastructure deployment—delivering performance,
Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare platform for seamless AI cluster management Modular rack-type building blocks support offerings
Configurations: 1, 4, and 16-POD setups NVIDIA DGX-Ready Managed Services Partner
Scalable from 64 to over 24,000 NVIDIA GPUs
End-to-end monitoring for AI infrastructure
Full lifecycle cluster management to streamline operations
Supports the latest high-speed networking technologies
Whether just getting started or scaling to enterprise-level AI operations, OriginAI offers validated configurations to grow with your needs. Start small and scale up to 24,000 GPUs—or more—as your requirements evolve.
ICE ClusterWare AIM Service
Spares depot service for maximum uptime
Read More in the OriginAI Solution Brief
Design, Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Factories at Scale
As AI factories grow in scale and complexity, the need for intelligent, automated infrastructure management becomes increasingly critical.
Managing hundreds or thousands of compute nodes, maintaining system reliability and security, and configuring the applications and frameworks users and data scientists need can quickly overwhelm manual processes. Traditional enterprise IT management software does not have the ability to handle the complex system-of-systems that make up AI factories.
Purpose-built for these environments, Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare and ICE ClusterWare AIM service form the software foundation and intelligent automation layer that power high-performing, multi-tenant cluster deployment and scaling.
Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare and ICE ClusterWare AIM Service
Design, Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Factories at Scale
Voltage Park: A global leader in ML compute infrastructure
Voltage Park empowers a diverse range of clients with scalable and cost-effective cloud solutions tailored for AI and machine learning workloads. Their cloud environment ranks among the most advanced machine learning compute infrastructures worldwide. Accelerated by over 24,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs connected via NVIDIA InfiniBand Networking, which delivers the high-performance, low-latency fabric needed to scale workloads seamlessly across interconnected systems—enabling multiple instances to function as a single, massive supercomputer for advanced AI training.
Penguin Solutions’ proven OriginAI methodology—“Design. Build. Deploy. Manage.”—ensures production readiness and integration of key components, including:
24,000
Next-generation 3.2 TB InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnects
Voltage Park’s AI IaaS platform spans four data centers and is managed using Penguin Solutions ICE ClusterWare software, with Penguin Solutions providing comprehensive professional and managed services to maximize performance and reliability.
Read additional case studies to learn more about Penguin Solutions successful AI deployments.
NVIDIA H100 GPUs
Conclusion
Future-proofing your AI strategy
Together, Penguin Solutions and NVIDIA bring unmatched expertis technology, and infrastructure to enable AI at scale—helping organizations stay ahead in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.
As an NVIDIA-certified Elite Solution Provider for Networking, D Compute Systems, and Compute, and an NVIDIA DGX Managed Service Provider, Penguin Solutions is at the forefront of AI infrastru innovation. With over seven years of experience designing and implementing AI clusters, Penguin Solutions has successfully:
Managed and deployed close to 90,000 GPUs, delivering reliable performance for some of the most demanding workloads.
Managed over 2.3 billion hours of GPU runtime across industries such as financial services, social technology, energy, cloud service providers, life sciences, government, and higher education.
This proven expertise ensures organizations can seamlessly adop scale AI solutions while addressing the unique challenges of AI deployments—from designing advanced clusters to managing operations efficiently at scale. Together, Penguin Solutions and are building the foundation for future-ready AI strategies that with your business needs.
Ready to Get Started? Choose Your Path:
1. Exploring AI: Unsure where to start? Talk to us about designing your optimal AI solution.
2. Setting Up AI Infrastructure: Have the hardware but not the experience? Let us help you stand it up.
3. Sustaining AI Operations: Infrastructure in place? Tap our experts for optimal performance and long-term success.
Take the next step toward your AI leadership. Talk to Penguin Solutions’ AI experts today.