Another week, another AI-related IT partnership.
In recent months, there have been plenty of arrangements between relatively new AI companies and established IT giants such as Nvidia or hyperscalers. This week two established companies – hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) vendor Nutanix and chipmaker AMD – made a tech collaboration/investment deal.
The tech portion includes optimization of the Nutanix Cloud Platform and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform for AMD Instinct GPUs used for AI inferencing, as well as AMD EPYC CPUs. Nutanix will directly integrate the AMD ROCm software ecosystem and AMD Enterprise AI software into its management layer. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said he expects the first jointly engineered platform to be released in late 2026. The goal is to improve performance and cost for customers running AI either on premises or at the edge.
On the investment side, AMD will buy $150 million in Nutanix common stock at $36.26 per share and commit up to $100 million for joint development and go-to-market programs.
Nutanix already supported AMD CPUs but AI requires AMD’s accelerated chips.
“Enterprises are building AI applications,” Ramaswami said in a call with media after Nutanix’s earnings report this week. “They're consumers of AI. They're building inferencing applications, they're building agentic AI applications. So what we're doing with this platform is we are providing the infrastructure software along with the hardware from AMD through several partners for companies to run their enterprise inferencing and agenting applications and manage all the data associated with that.”
Nutanix announced the AMD partnership during its earnings call this week. The HCI vendor had strong results – its $722.8 million in revenue increased 10.4% year-over-year and beat expectations. But Ramaswami warned that supply chain issues are delaying deals despite healthy customer demand. While he said they were not the reason for the AMD deal, he said the industry is experiencing CPU shortages now with memory shortages right behind as customers gear up for AI.
“There’s shortages of everything,” he said. “There's obviously memory shortages, there's CPU shortages, and there's some GPU shortages as well.”
Apparently there’s still no shortage of unhappy VMware customers. Ramaswami said most of the 1,000-plus new customers Nutanix added last quarter came from VMware. Nutanix is among the main virtualization rivals to Broadcom’s VMware.
“A very strong quarter in terms of adding new customers into the mix,” he said. “Many of them are choosing an alternate virtualization platform. A subset of them are going to the public cloud with us. A smaller subset right now are using us along with external storage. And then we are still in the early innings of people adopting us for cloud native [Kubernetes] use cases.”