The AI landscape is evolving, and businesses are set to unlock innovative uses of AI to grow their business exponentially. As AI adoption grows across the globe, governments internationally are introducing new regulations to address the risks of AI, with a focus on creating AI guardrails that apply across the AI lifecycle.

Recently, the Australian government introduced new regulations for safe and responsible AI to develop a regulatory environment that builds community trust and promotes AI adoption at scale. To meet this strong demand for scalable, safe and responsible AI, IBM is launching watsonx on IBM Cloud in Australia and New Zealand, significantly enhancing cloud infrastructure in the region.

IBM watsonx™ suite is an enterprise grade platform for generative AI and machine learning solutions offering a state-of-the-art AI studio, data store and AI governance toolkit.

The Sydney, Australia data center will offer several key advantages for clients:

• Data sovereignty: Manage and store data locally to comply with Australia’s stringent privacy regulations, ensuring sensitive information remains secure.

• Low latency connectivity: IBM Cloud’s high-performance network connectivity significantly reduces latency for users across Australia, essential for real-time data processing.

• Scalable AI: The modular design enables businesses to scale operations seamlessly, provisioning resources quickly based on demand.

• Access to advanced generative AI models: Clients can leverage a variety of generative AI models hosted in Sydney, including Llama-3-2-11b-vision-instruct and Granite-34b-code-instruct.

• Open hybrid cloud strategy: Integrate the best features and functions from any cloud or traditional IT environment and tap the unmatched pace and quality of innovations from the open-source community. Collaboration with Hugging Face will work to bring the best of open-source AI models to the enterprise on the watsonx platform.

IBM watsonx suite provides a comprehensive AI solution catering to all your AI needs in one unified platform. Three products will be launched in Sydney with more to follow.

1. IBM watsonx.ai™ is an AI studio designed for enterprise-grade AI developers, offering a simplified and scalable development experience for creating AI applications with low-code/no-code tools, preconfigured patterns, and frameworks within development environment of your choice. Access a wide range of IBM and third-party models, along with easy-to-use tools and system prompts for building, deploying, and monitoring AI applications.

1. watsonx.data is an open data lakehouse designed to serve as a single source for all your organization's data needs. Built with open standards, it allows for seamless integration and access to data from various sources across disparate environments. With support for multiple query engines, watsonx.data optimizes AI and analytics workloads for the best price-performance. Users can easily connect their data to watsonx.ai or other AI tools to enhance the relevance and precision of AI models.

1. watsonx.governance™ enables companies to deploy AI responsibly by offering a powerful AI governance, risk and compliance (GRC) tool kit built to automate AI lifecycle workflows, proactively detect and mitigate risk, and meet the changing legal, compliance and regulatory landscape. It ensures that AI workflows are transparent, accountable and explainable. Through effective AI governance, business analysts can assess the reliability of their AI solutions. Later this year, watsonx.governance is expected to include model inventory, documentation, evaluation, and monitoring through the lite and essentials plans available on IBM Cloud. Availability of the model risk governance capabilities is planned for a future date  available via the IBM Cloud catalog.

Explore how IBM watsonx can help you scale AI with trust. Watch out for these releases and more as we bring additional dimensions to expand our reach in Australia for businesses to harness the power of watsonx to improve productivity and maximize return on investment for their AI initiatives.

Explore the power of IBM watsonx.

Explore how watsonx Developer Hub can help developers scale AI at speed.

Source: https://www.ibm.com/