University of Utah Launches $50M AI Factory with HPE and NVIDIA

The University of Utah together with the State of Utah and technology partners Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA is launching an AI Factory as a 50 million dollar investment in advanced research computing infrastructure. Professor Manish Parashar, the university's Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, has described the project. The initiative will expand the university's capacity for artificial intelligence driven discovery while strengthening Utah's AI and technology ecosystem. The infrastructure is still being built. The system will increase high performance computing and AI capabilities to enable analysis of massive datasets and training of advanced machine learning models. It will accelerate discovery in fields including medicine, engineering, social sciences and humanities. An AI Factory is defined as an integrated computing environment for the development, training and deployment of artificial intelligence models at scale. The University of Utah version will use NVIDIA GPU technologies and HPE infrastructure. It will support training of large scale machine learning and deep learning models as well as processing of multimodal datasets such as imaging, genomics, clinical data, text and sensor data. The platform is being developed as a sovereign AI environment with local control and governance of computing resources and data. This approach supports work with sensitive datasets including clinical and genomic information under institutional governance and regulatory compliance. The AI Factory will support research across disciplines such as biomedical discovery, precision medicine, cancer research, drug discovery, clinical decision support, engineering simulation, digital twin technologies, climate and environmental modeling, geospatial analysis, social science and humanities scholarship. The project is part of a strategy to strengthen Utah's role as a national hub for artificial intelligence and data driven innovation. Collaboration among the university, the state, industry partners and research institutions will aim to accelerate breakthroughs in healthcare and technology while supporting workforce development and economic growth. Researchers are encouraged to reference the AI Factory in grant proposals for projects involving artificial intelligence, machine learning or computational modeling. The facility operates under the Utah RAISE initiative, which stands for Research and AI Infrastructure for a Statewide Ecosystem. Jakob Jensen, Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah, issued the announcement.