Nvidia rolled out its new edge computing platform, EGX, this week with support from several partners including Cisco, Red Hat, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. And it boasts more than 40 early-access customers including BMW, Foxconn, GE Healthcare, Seagate Technology, and Harvard Medical School.

The platform, called Nvidia EGX, is highly scalable, starting with the tiny Nvidia Jetson Nano system on module. This micro device is built for small, low-power artificial intelligence (AI) systems and can provide one-half trillion operations per second (TOPS) of processing for tasks such as image recognition. And it spans to a full rack of Nvidia T4 servers — these are the same ones AWS and Google Cloud use in their data centers — delivering more than 10,000 TOPS for real-time speech recognition and other real-time AI tasks.

“In five years we will be talking about how the edge is eating the cloud because all the compute needs will be out there at the edge,” said Justin Boitano, senior director of Enterprise and Edge Computing Solutions at Nvidia. “Nvidia is bringing all of our leading AI technology to the edge and trying to make it easy for enterprises to build these new services, whether it’s for speech or vision or data analytics.” And, he added, this requires not only Nvidia tech but also working with partners.

This includes partnering with Red Hat to integrate Nvidia Edge Stack with OpenShift for enterprise-grade Kubernetes container orchestration. Edge Stack includes Nvidia drivers; a CUDA Kubernetes plug-in; a CUDA container runtime; CUDA-X libraries; and containerized AI frameworks and applications, including TensorRT, TensorRT Inference Server, and DeepStream.

The edge platform also supports Mellanox and Cisco security, networking, and storage technologies. (Nvidia is in the process of acquiring Mellanox, and that transaction is expected to close by year-end.)

AI applications developed in AWS and Azure can run on Nvidia EGX and vice versa. The Edge Stack also connects to major cloud IoT services, allowing customers to remotely manage their service from AWS IoT Greengrass and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge.

EGX servers are available from a number of vendors, including ATOS, Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Inspur, and Lenovo.