Revolutionizing Industries with Applied AI

Aixia saw the potential of AI to revolutionize industrial production environments at an early stage. The success of an initial project involving Pure Storage became the foundation for an ongoing collaboration that led to a strategic partnership with the Swedish government as well as work with traditional consumer industries as they look to AI for creative new approaches.

In the nascent field of applied artificial intelligence (AI), Aixia is a pioneer. The company, which focuses on AI/Machine Learning and IT infrastructure, has a strategic partnership with Pure Storage. Aixia recognized the potential of AI to revolutionize production environments and has been guiding customers through their AI journey since 2017. 

“Aixia has always aimed to simplify the complex and develop solutions that make its customers more competitive,” says Petter Ahlén, AI & Data Center Sales/Marketing Manager, Aixia. “Pure Storage has helped make that possible.”

One of the company’s first challenges was to design and develop a first-of-its-kind, AI-ready data center for a customer in the automotive industry. Crucially, the data center had to be capable of allowing GPUs to work at full potential, facilitating exceptionally fast data flows.     

Aixia tapped the potential of Pure Storage FlashBlade to deliver the performance, efficiency, and reliability needed for customers to accelerate their adoption of AI. Aixia and Pure worked closely with the automotive customer to jointly design and implement one of the first instances of Pure’s AI Ready Infrastructure (AIRI), which combines FlashBlade with the NVIDIA DGX platform for next-generation AI performance. AIRI’s simplicity and performance was critical to Aixia’s ability to deliver a highly successful project that exceeded customer expectations.    

“This initial project marked the start of a successful and ongoing collaboration with Pure that has seen Aixia rapidly evolve our AI business, adding our own AI/ML orchestration capabilities to existing design and build services,” says Ahlén. “We have also expanded from AI/ML infrastructure and operations to developing applied AI solutions for customers. This is a key market differentiator for Aixia.”

Aixia is always on the lookout for opportunities to innovate with AI. The company entered a strategic partnership with AI Sweden – a government body whose mission is to accelerate the use of AI for the benefit of society and national competitiveness. As a core technology partner, Aixia provides the technology to run all of the organization’s projects from its data center with AIRI. 

“AI Sweden has found AIRI particularly useful for large training projects and the development of large language models. It’s become the standard for the delivery of all AI projects,” says Ahlén.     

Aixia is also using AI to find new approaches to traditional industries.  Swedish brewer Ocean asked Aixia to help it produce a low alcohol beer with the help of AI. Aixia digitized the brewer’s existing recipe catalogue, compared those with statistics on beer sales in Sweden to identify consumption and taste profiles, then used generative AI to produce recipes for the low alcohol beer.

“Ocean Beer’s master brewer was involved throughout the process and the result was a light, hoppy, and tasty low alcohol beer. It was a great collaboration mixing technology and human expertise that demonstrated the ability of AI to bring new approaches to creativity,” says Ahlén.

Aixia recognized an opportunity to help customers rapidly deploy impactful applied AI solutions. The company uses FlashBlade and the AIRI reference architecture in its own data center to support an AI as-a-service offering.

“With AI as-a-service, there’s no need for complex in-house builds. Customers can get AI projects up and running quickly to deliver rapid ROI,” says Simon Janeck, Head of R&D at Aixia. “Pure plays an integral role in making that possible.”

One USB manufacturer worked with Aixia on an applied AI project addressing quality controls in production environments. Aixia developed a solution that helped to increase production from 40,000 to 150,000 units per week while retaining the same levels of quality control staff — a big win delivered in a fraction of the time utilizing AI as-a-service.

Pure and Aixia together will continue to innovate and support new customers in existing and new vertical sectors, all powered by FlashBlade and AIRI.     

"Our relationship with Pure has been very successful. It's the starting point for AI for us. Without Pure we wouldn't be where we are now,” says Ahlén.