Cohere and Fujitsu team up on enterprise AI push

The duo will build enterprise-grade large language models (LLMs) ‘focused on meeting businesses where they are and in the languages they speak.’

Fujitsu will be the exclusive provider of the jointly developed services, which will have a particular emphasis on security and data privacy, with private cloud deployments for organizations in highly regulated industries such as financial institutions, the public sector, and R&D units in mind.

The technology will be based on Cohere’s Command R+ model which offers such tools as verifiable accuracy with citations, multilingual support, and tools to automate business tasks. Fujitsu meanwhile will use Embed and Rerank models to build enterprise search applications and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.

“The combination of our frontier AI technology and Fujitsu’s expertise and fine-tuning capabilities will give enterprises best-in-class LLMs with advanced Japanese language capabilities to help boost productivity and efficiency,” states the release. “We’re excited to be working with Fujitsu, a global leader in technology that drives digital transformation with effective business solutions. We look forward to building on this strategic partnership to offer cutting-edge AI technology for businesses globally.”

In other enterprise AI happenings, SK Telecom is investing $200 Million in SMART Global Holdings, an integrated AI data centre provider based in the US. SGH offers specialised platforms and services for high-performance computing, AI, machine learning, fault-tolerant computing, and IoT. It’s Penguin Solutions business provides integrated AI data centres which include the design of AI clusters consisting of large-scale GPU servers.

The two firms also intend to ‘leverage their complementary capabilities’ to churn out some new AI factory and data centre solutions and services, advanced memory market products and services, and NPU-based AI edge servers.

“Our investment in and cooperation with SGH will give us an opportunity to boost our position in the AI value chain,” said Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SKT. “In the era of AI transformation, we plan to continue to collaborate and make proactive investments to achieve global leadership in AI.”

Mark Adams, CEO of SGH added: “We are thrilled to have SKT as a strategic investor. Today’s announcement is a testament to Penguin Solutions’ capabilities in the deployment of AI factories at scale through our systems, software, and managed services suite of solutions. We look forward to executing on these strategic collaboration opportunities with the SKT team and believe they will create value for our respective stakeholders.”

The investment adds to the list of AI-related firms SKT has teamed up with or injected some cash into, which also includes Anthropic, Lambda, and Perplexity.