Nvidia has landed the world’s largest potential customer for the edge supercomputing platform it revealed just two months ago. The scope of the chipmaker’s deal with China Mobile is unclear, but it marks a major win for the vendor that underlines Nvidia’s ability to advance the nascent technology at scale.

The state-controlled operator is the undisputed global leader in mobile communications. It claims nearly 1 billion customers and it began activating 5G services last month with more than 50,000 5G base stations already deployed across 50 cities in China.

Nvidia’s EGX Edge Supercomputing platform is cloud native, powered by the Cuda Tensor Core graphics processing unit (GPU), and can process 15 teraflops of data per second. The vendor, which describes it as a breakthrough in edge supercomputing, is working with Ericsson on the development of a virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN), with Red Hat to implement Kubernetes for a carrier-grade software stack, and with Microsoft to integrate the Azure cloud platform to advance edge-to-cloud artificial intelligence (AI) computation.

China Mobile’s early trial work with Nvidia includes the use of its GPUs and the EGX platform to develop new educational tools and improve response and real-time monitoring of natural disasters and emergency medical services. The operator is using Nvidia’s GPUs in its burgeoning 5G network to equip first responders and doctors with AI-powered tools that can remotely diagnose patents and transmit footage from drones at the scene of an unfolding disaster.

The operator has also used Nvidia’s technology to connect a classroom in a rural area of Sichuan with students in Chengdu to facilitate interactive learning via virtual reality (VR) on its 5G network, according to the chipmaker. China Mobile plans to shift computational processing from data centers to Nvidia’s GPUs at the edge, the company added.

Nvidia also announced that its EGX servers will be the first GPU hardware incorporated under the Open Telecom IT Infrastructure project, which is part of an effort led by China Mobile and others to standardize the use of servers for 5G mobile edge computing.

The chipmaker claims that dozens of data center server and software vendors are offering EGX systems to customers today, including Inspur, H3C, Lenovo, Dell Technologies, Mellanox, Cisco, and VMware.

When CEO Jensen Huang announced the EGX platform at MWC Los Angeles 2019, he described it as an opportunity to help operators gain more value out of edge computing on 5G. “The edge can no longer just be a pipe,” he said.

“The impact of bringing intelligence out to the edge is extraordinary,” Huang said at the time. “The future is software defined, and these low-latency applications that have to be delivered at the edge can now be provisioned at the edge.”