Private Cloud AI Infrastructure That Just Works

In this article, Jamie Robinson, Portfolio Lead for Private Cloud at Telefónica Tech, explores the growing potential of HPE’s Private Cloud for AI and how organisations can start to explore its benefits while maintaining full control over their data and security.

A couple of weeks ago a few of us here at Telefónica Tech were fortunate enough to be invited to an HPE/NVIDIA PCAI bootcamp, and it’s fair to say my head is still spinning with the possibilities. The bootcamp gave us a front-row seat to HPE Private Cloud AI (PCAI), a leading private cloud solution for AI workloads, and the chance to get hands-on with the technology. There was obviously plenty to discuss as a team, but it quickly became apparent that PCAI could be part of the next generation of private cloud AI-powered services we offer our customers.

A great deal of my career has been heavily focussed on infrastructure and virtualisation, making sure the technology backbone was solid, scalable, so not to cause users any headaches. When AI entered the discussion of every organisation on the planet a couple of years ago, “headaches” became a common theme. Even more so in a private cloud environment. Building an on-prem AI platform so far has felt a bit like a school science project; piecing together hardware, wrestling with software, and hoping it all played nicely together. In other words, it required a lot of time spent figuring out the ‘how’ instead of the ‘what’ so the actual AI-driven results everyone is after.

This is why HPE PCAI really caught my attention; could we now look to use this as a solid foundation for on prem AI? From what I’ve seen, the answer is a resounding yes. From Telefónica Tech’s perspective, with significant experience running AI in the public cloud, we can combine this technology with our expertise to speed up how we deploy AI-ready environments in our customers’ data centres.

The biggest takeaway for me personally is that HPE PCAI is a genuine turnkey solution. It’s available in 4 sizes, ranging from small, medium, large, and the recently announced developer option. Not to dumb it down, but it’s handy to think of it as an “AI factory in a box”. HPE and NVIDIA have clearly put in the hours to pre-integrate the hardware (AI-optimised HPE ProLiant servers, performant HPE storage, and powerful NVIDIA GPUs like the H100s and L40Ss) with NVIDIA’s comprehensive AI Enterprise software suite. Combined with our technical and strategic expertise, this creates a strong foundation to harness data effectively and explore new possibilities for innovation and growth.

For Telefónica Tech, looking to expand our AI offerings portfolio to our clients, this translates to:

Faster Time-to-Market:

Imagine being able to spin up a dedicated, optimised AI environment on-prem in days, not months. That’s a powerful differentiator.

A Full-Stack Foundation for Our Services:

This isn’t about hardware. It’s the complete stack – compute, storage, mighty-fast NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, and the critical NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. This includes frameworks, pre-trained models, software development kits, and NVIDIA Inference Microservices. With the right foundation, we can then then help you build more sophisticated and reliable AI services.

Your Data Centre, Your Rules:

This is a big one, as many of our customers have stringent data sovereignty and security needs. With HPE’s Private Cloud for AI, you get the kind of agile, self-service experience you’d expect from the public cloud, but it’s all based securely within your own data centre (or ours if you want). This means that for any AI work involving sensitive data, you can keep control and security on-site.

Scales With Your Ambition:

The various configurations on offer means we can tailor AI infrastructure resources to your specific needs. This ranges from a smaller “proof-of-concept” setup to a large-scale production deployment. We can also scale services as your AI adoption matures.

Powering Advanced Services:

The bootcamp gave us a good look under-the-hood. The real secret sauce is the software; NVIDIA AI Enterprise and HPE AI Essentials. NVIDIA AI Enterprise is far more than just software drivers; it’s a comprehensive software layer, built to streamline the entire AI development and deployment lifecycle. Tools like NVIDIA RAPIDS accelerate data science workflows, Triton Inference Server simplifies model deployment at scale, while TensorRT optimises deep learning inference for maximum performance. With access to the NVIDIA GPU Cloud catalogue, you can quickly pull pre-trained models and containers to jumpstart projects. Couple this with HPE AI Essentials where you have integrated notebooks and a readymade toolbox for all your data engineering, data science, analytics, and visualisation tasks. And the best bit? Well, I have been reliably informed by our AI experts attending the bootcamp, that your data scientists and developers will love this as they are more than likely already using them!

This foundation can evolve into managed services that integrate smoothly with your existing data and analytics workflows. Allowing teams to concentrate on advancing analytics, while ensuring the HPE PCAI platform remains secure, efficient, and aligned with business needs. Collaborating with a partner such as Telefónica Tech can help drive ongoing optimisation, and help identify opportunities to enhance data use, whether through new tools or updated models, to support continuous improvement.

I left the bootcamp feeling genuinely excited. For organisations that must keep AI workloads in their own data centres rather than the public cloud, AI is no longer just an idea or experiment, it’s real. Like any critical systems, HPE PCAI, with NVIDIA’s tech at its heart, looks set to provide a strong, reliable foundation. HPE PCAI, powered by NVIDIA technology, addresses key challenges like complexity, scalability, security, data privacy, and faster deployment time. It provides a solid base to build Telefónica Tech’s next generation of AI services, including private cloud options.

So, if you are reading this thinking this is amazing, and maybe realising that you hadn’t bothered with AI up until now because of the lack of viable AI options for the private cloud, then I would say now is the time to act. Our AI experts at Telefónica Tech can help you start planning or explore use cases tailored to your organisation today. You don’t have to wait for hardware delivery or formal approvals. The future of AI services at Telefónica Tech is looking very exciting, and we can’t wait support our customers on their AI journeys!

Bring AI capabilities in-house faster, securely, and at scale. No more wrestling with fragmented infrastructure or endless setup time. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling existing AI initiatives, Telefónica Tech’s expertise, combined with HPE and NVIDIA’s powerful turnkey platform, gives you a future-ready foundation that simply works.