Digital Realty partners with Turing to enhance full driving automation technology

Digital Realty has announced a significant partnership with Turing, Inc., a Japanese artificial intelligence (AI) company, in an effort to foster advancements in full driving automation technology. The collaboration involves the establishment of an advanced computation platform, known as the Gaggle Cluster, at Digital Realty’s NRT10 data centre located in Japan. This initiative is set against the backdrop of Turing’s flagship project, “Tokyo30,” which aims to achieve Level 5 full driving automation for an extended duration within Tokyo’s urban environment by the close of 2025.

Turing is pioneering the development of an end-to-end self-driving system that relies on AI to govern all vehicular functions, including steering, acceleration, and braking. This system operates using data sourced purely from the vehicle’s cameras. Notably, Turing’s technological advancements include the creation of ‘Heron,’ a multimodal generative AI that enables sophisticated decision-making through both text and visual data, as well as ‘Terra,’ a generative world model that processes complex real-world scenarios and generates realistic video representations of driving conditions.

The selection of Digital Realty’s NRT10 data centre for hosting the Gaggle Cluster was influenced by its capabilities as a certified NVIDIA DGX-ready facility, equipped with advanced cooling and power systems aimed at optimising the performance of high-demand GPU deployments. The Gaggle Cluster comprises an impressive 96 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which will be pivotal in accelerating Turing’s AI development cycles.

Significantly, the deployment of this platform has markedly improved Turing’s time-to-market for AI solutions, reducing their development timeline from one year to merely three months when compared to traditional on-premise setups. Furthermore, the high-density colocation services at NRT10 allowed Turing to streamline its infrastructure requirements from 20 racks down to eight, thereby increasing operational efficiency and flexibility.

Yu Yamaguchi, Chief Technology Officer at Turing, expressed the urgency in securing rapid computing resources: “As the global race to develop full driving automation systems accelerates, securing computing resources quickly is crucial. Digital Realty’s high-performance and flexible data centre enabled us to swiftly deploy a powerful GPU cluster that delivers maximum performance in a short period of time, further accelerating our AI development for full driving automation,” he stated.

Serene Nah, Managing Director and Head of Asia Pacific for Digital Realty, also highlighted the broader implications of this partnership, noting, “Digital Realty is excited to be at the forefront of this transformative journey, leveraging our extensive AI experience and expertise to support Turing’s groundbreaking AI innovation. By providing a high-performance and flexible data centre environment, we are enabling Turing to rapidly deploy and scale their critical AI computations.”

This collaboration is seen as a critical step in setting new industry standards for the effective deployment of AI solutions, as both companies aim to harness the transformative capabilities that AI technologies can offer to the transportation sector.

Source: Noah Wire Services