At the AI House in Davos, Swisscom announced the start of cooperation with NVIDIA to build full-stack supercomputers with generative AI in Switzerland and Italy based on NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AI software. As part of the cooperation, Swisscom aims to establish a Trusted AI Factory to leverage NVIDIA’s global ecosystem and cutting-edge solutions for the benefit of Swiss and Italian customers. Over the next few years, the Swisscom Group intends to invest up to CHF 100 million in AI solutions.
Swisscom announced on Tuesday at the AI House in Davos (in the opening photo) the start of a cooperation with NVIDIA aimed at building full stack supercomputers with generative AI (GenAI) in Switzerland that will leverage NVIDIA accelerated computing and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.
The project includes the framework NVIDIA NeMo to build, customize and implement generative AI applications. Through this cooperation, Swisscom aims to develop standardized, tailored and new AI use cases, both in collaboration with customers and for internal use.
As part of this cooperation, Swisscom aims to access NVIDIA’s cutting-edge technologies and establish a Trusted AI Factory, putting NVIDIA’s global ecosystem at the service of Swiss customers.
Christoph AeschlimannCEO of Swisscom, declares: «The collaboration with NVIDIA allows us to act as a bridge between the possibilities of technology and customer needs. We first build a high-performance infrastructure that will subsequently allow us to provide reliable services. We are already in contact with numerous customers to find out their specific needse.»
Over the next few years, the Swisscom Group intends to invest up to CHF 100 million in the development of AI infrastructure and services.
«Increasingly, telecommunications companies are seen as the best candidates for building, hosting and deploying sovereign AI. Having a reliable and high-performance infrastructure is now fundamental for the technological progress of any nation”, declares Keith Strier, Vice President of Worldwide AI Initiatives at NVIDIA. «By streamlining the development and deployment of industrial-grade AI applications, NVIDIA’s full-stack accelerated computing platform enables Swisscom to develop concrete, cutting-edge AI solutions for Swiss businesses, thus driving the transformation of the national economy.»
AI for Swiss customers
When opting for publicly available generative AI services, data management methods often lack transparency and are difficult for businesses to understand. Christoph Aeschlimann of Swisscom declares: «Generative AI is on everyone’s lips, but there is an enormous distance between expectations and reality. A customer needs to know for sure what is being done with their data, where and how. Given the numerous multinational organizations present on its territory, Switzerland requires unique and reliable sovereign modules for AI. And this is where we come in. Thanks to the close partnership with NVIDIA we are developing them in a safe and reliable way, with a strong Swiss identity.»
This collaboration gives Swisscom access to NVIDIA industry experts, who have first-hand experience implementing AI in various industries. Additionally, Swisscom is now positioning itself as a strategic reseller of NVIDIA technology, including the NVIDIA DGX platform and NVIDIA GPUs. With NVIDIA as a technology partner, Swisscom is preparing to meet all the AI needs of Swiss customers from a single source.
For many years now, Swisscom uses AI technologies internally in many fields such as customer service, network management and other services. Swisscom now boasts a long path of optimizing internal operations, for example in the classification of tickets and automatic sorting, and has generated its own linguistic model of Swiss-German to provide a better service to customers: an example is the Voice Search functionality of its TV platform.
Swisscom uses augmented reality in television studios to detect the kick-off of matches and the machine learning to optimize its networks and identify any anomalies.
The future of Fastweb with the adoption of AI
As part of the Group’s AI strategy, last December Fastweb, the Italian subsidiary of Swisscom, announced the purchase of 31 NVIDIA DGX H100 systems, the first large-scale AI-based NVIDIA DGX supercomputer in Italy for development of a national AI system.
Fastweb will make the high-performance NVIDIA DGX H100 cluster available in the cloud as Infrastructure as a Service and will leverage it to develop and deploy the first large language model trained natively in Italian.