University of Utah and the State of Utah to Accelerate Medical Research and Expand Regional Economic Development With a Sovereign AI Factory Powered by HPE and NVIDIA

By more than tripling the University’s computing capacity, the deployment will drive healthcare breakthroughs, economic development, and scientific discovery

In this article

• The sovereign AI factory will enable the University of Utah to improve the understanding of cancer, Alzheimer’s, mental health, and genetics by applying generative AI, agentic AI, and other AI technologies.
• The deployment is part of a State of Utah initiative to boost economic development by expanding AI infrastructure capabilities to attract new businesses and workforce talent.
• Built by HPE with an NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE solution, the University of Utah gains an integrated, full stack sovereign AI infrastructure, delivered via HPE GreenLake cloud and supported through HPE services, to handle public entity data processing within an environment built for data control, sovereignty, policy compliance, and security.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NVIDIA GTC DC – The University of Utah, a world-leading academic institution, will leverage cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) to advance medical research and drive innovation using a sovereign AI factory built by HPE (NYSE: HPE) with NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE infrastructure. The deployment is part of an economic development initiative by the State of Utah to expand AI infrastructure to attract new businesses and workforce talent. The adoption will more than triple the University’s computing capacity and amplify its capability to accelerate healthcare breakthroughs, drive economic development, and enable innovation across disciplines.

“Academic institutions play a critical role in providing research hubs to the public. As they continue to invest in AI to fuel those initiatives, they need to meet compliance requirements to protect data and IP,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. “We are proud to partner with NVIDIA and power the University of Utah’s AI-driven scientific efforts, while making data governance core to the mission, with an integrated sovereign AI solution that combines powerful infrastructure, software and services.”

As a full stack sovereign AI factory in the U.S. developed by HPE and NVIDIA, the infrastructure will provide the University of Utah with a fully integrated solution managed by HPE through HPE GreenLake. It includes NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE solutions, including servers, GPUs, storage, networking, advanced cooling systems, software, and HPE services which are required to handle massive processing and data requirements for academic research and regional economic expansion. Services include data center build out, sovereign AI at scale implementation, and cloud integration. The solution provides the University of Utah an AI factory that is designed for a public sector entity with complete data control, sovereignty, policy compliance, and security.

“The U has a proud legacy of pioneering technological breakthroughs,” said Taylor Randall, president of the University of Utah. “Our goal is ensuring the state is awash in computing power by building a robust and scalable AI ecosystem that benefits our entire higher education system, powers research to find new healthcare cures, and ignites Utah’s entrepreneurial spirit.”

“Educational institutions that unite innovation with deep technical expertise are accelerating breakthroughs in research and applied AI to tackle society’s greatest challenges,” said Dion Harris, senior director, HPC, Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions at NVIDIA. “The University of Utah’s new NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE infrastructure builds on a legacy in graphics, computing and interdisciplinary strength in medicine, engineering and data science—fueling discovery and turning ideas into lasting impact.”

A sovereign AI factory delivered through HPE GreenLake cloud for efficient, manageable, and scalable infrastructure

For its sovereign AI factory, the University of Utah selected HPE Cray XD670 servers and NVIDIA Hopper GPUs to accelerate AI performance and speed time-to-results for large language model (LLM) training, natural language processing (NLP), multimodal training, and other emerging AI workloads. This system can handle heavily parallelizable workloads to gain insights from large amounts of structured and unstructured data.

AI factory solution components include HPE OpsRamp Software and HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software to help streamline IT operations, simplifying management of multicloud resources and supporting a shared, multi-tenant platform for research across the University. It runs traditional, cloud-native, and AI workloads—and crucially, allows the University to bring existing workloads back from the public cloud, cutting costs by up to two-thirds.¹

Using HPE GreenLake at Colocation, the University benefits from streamlined, end-to-end management of both cloud and colocation services. For the colocation partner, HPE selected DataBank based on its capacity to handle high-density workloads within proximity to the University. In addition to securely handling massive volumes of data, the deployment will enable the University to tackle generative AI, agentic AI, and other AI workloads with IT and data center infrastructure that is also energy efficient, easily-managed, and rapidly-scalable. DataBank’s colocation data center provides the University of Utah with an innovation showcase for both its institution and the community.

Huntsman gift jump-starts the initiative

Making the University of Utah’s sovereign AI factory a reality are Brynn and Peter Huntsman, along with the Huntsman Family Foundation. Together, they will provide the University with a sizeable lead philanthropic gift that is intended to initiate the project and encourage others to supply the additional support necessary for moving the work forward.

Additional Resources:

• The sovereign stack — The need for trusted, compliant AI infrastructure
• HPE AI factory portfolio
• HPE Cray XD670
• HPE GreenLake
• HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software
• HPE OpsRamp Software
• NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE

Recent HPE News:

• HPE unveils new AI factory solutions built with NVIDIA to accelerate AI adoption at global scale

About HPE

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¹ Based on HPE analysis of cost of running customer workloads within a private colocation environment using GreenLake versus public cloud.