Providing hyperscale data centers with a fast, flexible path for AI, the new HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator is an open-source design released in conjunction with Microsoft's Project Olympus.

HGX-1 does for cloud-based AI workloads what ATX -- Advanced Technology eXtended -- did for PC motherboards when it was introduced more than two decades ago. It establishes an industry standard that can be rapidly and efficiently embraced to help meet surging market demand.

The new architecture is designed to meet the exploding demand for AI computing in the cloud -- in fields such as autonomous driving, personalized healthcare, superhuman voice recognition, data and video analytics, and molecular simulations.

"AI is a new computing model that requires a new architecture," said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "The HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator will do for AI cloud computing what the ATX standard did to make PCs pervasive today. It will enable cloud-service providers to easily adopt NVIDIA GPUs to meet surging demand for AI computing."

"The HGX-1 AI accelerator provides extreme performance scalability to meet the demanding requirements of fast-growing machine learning workloads, and its unique design allows it to be easily adopted into existing data centers around the world," wrote Kushagra Vaid, general manager and distinguished engineer, Azure Hardware Infrastructure, Microsoft, in a blog post.

Microsoft, NVIDIA and Ingrasys (a Foxconn subsidiary) collaborated to architect and design the HGX-1 platform. The companies are sharing it widely as part of Microsoft's Project Olympus contribution to the Open Compute Project, a consortium whose mission is to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center and beyond.

In addition, NVIDIA is joining the Open Compute Project to help drive AI and innovation in the data center. The company plans to continue its work with Microsoft, Ingrasys and other members to advance AI-ready computing platforms for cloud service providers and other data center customers.