Phoenix Technologies and IBM offer first-of-their-kind sovereign AI solutions and services in Switzerland
Phoenix Technologies, a Swiss Tech Cluster, and IBM today announced that new and existing Phoenix clients will have access to IBM’s advanced AI hardware and software, including IBM watsonx, powered by OpenShift AI, through a new AI innovation center in Switzerland. Focusing on healthcare and life sciences, financial services, and government institutions, businesses will be able to use Phoenix’s kvant AI solution powered by IBM's AI applications and infrastructure, integrated with the “Swiss Sovereign Cloud” of Phoenix.
The Phoenix kvant AI solution will serve the rising demand to build, tune, and deploy advanced AI models on a sovereign cloud in Switzerland with exceptional availability, scalability, and security on every layer of the technology stack. The collaboration of Phoenix, IBM and Red Hat offers kvant AI users a complete end-to-end AI solution, based on state-of-the-art AI-centric computing capabilities, to foster AI foundation model development and research.
“There’s a rising demand for AI applications and with kvant AI and IBM watsonx, we want to enable Swiss businesses to build, use and benefit from AI assets and AI-embedded solutions to expand the global competitiveness of Switzerland.”
Clients can leverage Phoenix’s complete kvant AI solution that applies IBM watsonx, including kvant AI offerings such as AI Unit, AI Services and AI Data Services. To accelerate innovation, kvant AI will meet common compliance and certification standards and the high regulatory requirements for institutions across all key industries in Switzerland, including enterprises, scale-ups and government institutions.
“Today’s announcement enables Swiss businesses and research institutions to foster AI innovation in a secure, reliable, trusted and flexible cloud located in Switzerland,”
This full AI stack is part of an AI innovation center, opening in summer 2024, at the heart of the most dynamic life sciences cluster in Europe, Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area Main Campus, Allschwil with access to 115’000m2 interconnected innovation space. The AI innovation center will be an inspiring place with robust hardware computing resources and core software in AI providing a platform with end-to-end commercial services and infrastructure, engaging all industries to catalyze and adopt industry utilization and ecosystem development.
“Switzerland is home to a thriving ecosystem of innovative technology organizations, keen to apply the latest advances in AI technology to their most complex challenges. Our collaboration with Phoenix will give clients access to IBM’s watsonx enterprise AI platform as well as prototype infrastructure from IBM Research specifically designed for AI workloads, enabling Phoenix clients to apply the latest technologies across the AI stack to solve these challenges and accelerate scientific discovery."
This collaboration will provide Phoenix clients with leading generative AI software: access to IBM’s watsonx data and AI platform for workflows and solutions, as well as Red Hat OpenShift AI for management and runtime needs. Supported by watsonx.governance, users will be able to to monitor, catalogue and govern generative AI, Machine Learning and Large Language Models across the entire AI lifecycle, so that risks can be better identified and mitigated and ethical and regulatory compliant practices can be supported.
To provide a full-stack solution, the agreement also includes the installation of AI-optimized infrastructure in Switzerland. It includes GPUs and IBM's prototype Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU), managed with Red Hat OpenShift to provide a hybrid cloud-native environment. Together, the GPUs and AIUs will power kvant AI. The AIU is a complete system-on-a-chip from IBM Research designed specifically for generative AI inferencing. PCIe cards containing the IBM AIU can easily be installed onto a server rack to supplement GPUs used for AI training, aiming to improve compute utilization and efficiency.
The AI cluster within the Phoenix “Swiss Sovereign Cloud” is available and businesses can reach out to Phoenix to start their journey to sovereign AI in Switzerland or get further details at https://www.kvant.cloud/ai