Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., announced a collaboration with American Tower aiming to advance network architecture and accelerating near-edge applications. Powered by Qualcomm Technologies’ next-generation capabilities in the connected intelligent edge and American Tower’s tower portfolio and data centre assets, the project is intended to help drive innovation to address evolving needs of edge data centres across areas of latency, reliability, power efficiency, and high bandwidth.
In today’s digital era, enterprises operate within a competitive environment and rely on technology for differentiation. This has created demand for near-premises data centre technologies that can improve business outcomes. One way to build competitive differentiation is to provide technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and 5G networks closer to the end device or “at the edge”. By taking advantage of Qualcomm platforms’ high performance at low-power consumption, reliability, AI, and 5G connectivity capabilities in an American Tower Data Centre, this project aims to meet the next generation of digital transformation.
Qualcomm Technologies aims to enhance the compute ecosystem by deploying a new class of infrastructure focused on optimising network architecture and compute power closer to the edge, where data is generated. As the first initiative, system integrator Xingtera, Inc., will be installing a 2U ARM-based server XT-iES865-80 at an American Tower edge data centre located in Denver, Colorado. The 2U server incorporates 80 Qualcomm QCS8250 chipsets in one server – combining high-density, high computing performance and high graphics processing nodes into one intelligent edge server. This multi-access edge compute solution features a heterogeneous computing architecture combined with Qualcomm AI Engine and is designed to reliably run dynamic, process-intensive applications, such as mobile cloud gaming, video transcoding, machine learning and edge compute at incredibly high speed and low latency.
“Qualcomm Technologies is at the forefront of reorganising the compute ecosystem, and we’re looking for ways to catalyse the transition by driving even greater reliability, security, connectivity, resilience and latency,” says Jeffery Torrance, senior vice president and general manager, connected smart systems, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We realise this undertaking takes an ecosystem of global technology leaders – all who want to reinvent how compute, storage, networking and lowest cost routing come together. This collaboration with American Tower further positions Qualcomm Technologies as the edge partner of choice for the cloud economy.”
The collaboration also capitalises on American Tower’s management as a digital infrastructure provider. American Tower has a broad portfolio of data centres and tower assets that enable customers to improve their performance, increase flexibility and obtain reliable support for their IT infrastructure.
“American Tower offers distributed real estate to enable next generation applications regardless of the end user’s location. We are where you need the edge to be,” says Jake Rasweiler, senior vice president of US Tower Innovation at American Tower. “We are very excited about the opportunity to bring together our organisations with the goal of advancing edge technology.”
The Qualcomm QCS8250 SoC is equipped with native Android support, which is designed to support a wide range of mobile ecosystem partners and a vast developer community to build compatible mobile gaming and multimedia applications. “XT-iES865-80 servers located inside the Edge Data Centre next to an American Tower 4G/5G cellular site provides best-in-class app experience for mobile users and helps drive excellent ROI for PaaS and SaaS businesses. We offer one of the lowest total costs of ownership while cutting operating energy usage by up to 70%, which in turn helps reduce carbon footprint and support sustainability benefits,” says Yuqing Niu, chief executive officer of Xingtera, Inc.
Qualcomm Technologies and American Tower will continue to work together, combining expertise in mobile technologies and wireless infrastructure, to evolve the role of data centres and reach new levels of compute power and performance. Future projects will aim to address and further advance areas of AI, cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X), 5G and fixed wireless access, autonomous systems, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) use cases.
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