NVIDIA has partnered with Equinix, the world’s largest data center colocation provider, and Together AI, an AI inference platform, to deliver open-model inference services to enterprise customers through a collaborative division of labor: Equinix provides colocation services, Together AI offers the inference platform, and NVIDIA supplies GPUs and its software stack. This move marks NVIDIA’s expansion of its computing ecosystem from the training side to the inference side, completing a full closed loop.
NVIDIA is expanding the footprint of its AI infrastructure from the training side to the inference side.
On Wednesday,$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$it announced a partnership with Together AI, the world’s largest data center colocation and AI inference platform provider,$Equinix Inc (EQIX.US)$to jointly offer open-model inference services to enterprise clients, thereby completing the final link in the value chain from model training to inference deployment.
Under the tripartite division of labor,$Equinix Inc (EQIX.US)$Equinix Inc provides data center colocation, Together AI supplies the inference platform,$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$and NVIDIA provides GPUs and the software stack. The three parties bundle hardware, software, and colocation capabilities to directly address the inference stage of enterprise-grade AI applications.
This partnership represents a strategic addition to NVIDIA’s inference ecosystem. Having already established a leading position on the training side, the company is now extending its reach to enterprise customers through open-model inference, thereby further broadening the coverage of its computing power ecosystem.
For Equinix, this collaboration also signifies that it has identified a differentiated entry point—enterprise-grade open-model inference—amidst the trillion-dollar boom in AI data center construction.
Tripartite Division of Labor: A Combination of Colocation, Platform, and Computing Power
In this collaboration,$Equinix Inc (EQIX.US)$Equinix Inc is responsible for data center colocation, Together AI provides the inference platform, and NVIDIA supplies GPUs and the software stack.
Amidst the trillion-dollar surge in AI data center construction, Equinix, as the world’s largest data center colocation provider, has focused its positioning on the niche segment of enterprise-grade open-model inference through its alliance with NVIDIA and Together AI, emerging as another key beneficiary attracting significant attention in this collaboration.
The core objective of the three-party collaboration is to help enterprise customers run inference workloads for open models, rather than limiting computing resources to a few leading model providers.
NVIDIA’s rationale for betting on open models is clear. CEO Jensen Huang recently published an op-ed articulating the importance of open-source AI, which received endorsements from nearly all major AI companies. In his view, AI models and applications are complements to NVIDIA’s GPUs; the prosperity of open-source models implies more accurate and broader demand for computing power.
Inference revenue has surpassed training revenue, as NVIDIA completes its closed-loop ecosystem.
According to$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$An investor conference revealed that approximately 18 months ago, NVIDIA’s revenue from training and inference was roughly evenly split; currently, inference revenue has surpassed training revenue, and this gap is expected to continue widening.
Meanwhile, AI computing infrastructure revenue contributed by emerging cloud service providers has exceeded 50%, indicating that growth momentum is shifting from traditional hyperscale cloud vendors to a broader AI computing power ecosystem.
On the training and architecture fronts, NVIDIA had already made intensive strategic moves.
The company introduced Groq’s core team and its LPU technology through licensing agreements and plans to deeply integrate LPU into its next-generation Vera Rubin architecture (Groq 3 LPX). It also intends to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
This collaboration with Equinix and Together AI represents a key step for NVIDIA in extending its footprint into the inference sector, ensuring its computing ecosystem covers the entire chain from model training to inference deployment.
Editor/melody