NTT Adopting NVIDIA AI Platform to Power Company-Wide Artificial Intelligence Initiative

TOKYO, Sept. 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GTC Japan -- NTT Group, one of the world’s largest telecom companies, is adopting NVIDIA’s AI platform based on Tensor Core GPUs as the common platform for its company-wide “corevo” AI initiative, NVIDIA today announced at its GPU Technology Conference.

NTT Group has more than 5,000 researchers and has assigned 400 AI specialists to support the corevo initiative, which extends to a broad range of commercial products and services built on real-time processing. These include projects in areas focused on natural language processing in call centers, network maintenance, human assistance and healthcare.

NTT will build corevo’s cloud-based AI resource center on the NVIDIA Tesla V100 platform, which brings extraordinary speed and scalability for AI inferencing and training, as well as for accelerating high performance computing and graphics workloads. Built on Volta, NVIDIA’s seventh-generation GPU architecture, Tesla V100 GPUs include 21 billion transistors and deliver the performance of up to 100 CPUs in a single GPU.

“With growing demand for AI across multiple industries, NVIDIA and NTT are making advances in deep learning to tackle some of the greatest challenges of our time,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Business at NVIDIA. “Through NTT’s cloud-based resource center, NTT researchers can accelerate their AI development to deliver powerful new AI products and services to customers.”

Masahisa Kawashima, vice president of the NTT Software Innovation Center, said: “Creating a common development platform for the NTT Group will enable us to utilize the results of NTT Group’s AI R&D effectively and accelerate the creation of new value. I am convinced that adopting the NVIDIA AI platform will prove vital in expanding corevo services and products.”

NTT conceived of the corevo initiative two years ago to address a wide range of issues confronting Japanese society, particularly related to its rapidly aging population, which is leading to a diminishing active workforce and geriatric-related challenges.

Corevo is focused on four broad AI capabilities, including “Agent AI” focused on natural language processing and chat for call center and geriatric monitoring; “Ambient AI” focused on big data analytics for traffic analysis and control; “Heart-Touching AI” focused on body and emotional analytics for healthcare, sports and entertainment; and “Network AI” for anonymous detection, failure prediction and network monitoring.