Technology giant Lenovo has announced a $1.2 billion investment in artificial intelligence, aiming to tap into the projected $29 billion AI server and storage market and drive partner sales.

According to CRN, Stacey Goodman, senior director of U.S. VAR Partner Sales for Lenovo, announced this strategic move at the 2023 XChange Best of Breed conference.

Lenovo’s investment aligns with the industry trend. Said Goodman:

“We’re bringing AI to the edge for all enterprises with solutions that are powered by our ThinkEdge AI platforms… through a diverse portfolio of on-prem deployments, scalable software, and secure automation of edge deployments, we’re unlocking faster insights and business values for customers across numerous sectors.”

2023 has been a banner year for AI investment and development, thanks in no small part to the success of generative LLM chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic‘s Claude. These companies, now the market leaders in the field, have been followed by Google, Meta, Amazon, and others into the fray, along with countless startups and hopeful investors.

Market interest in AI has boosted adjacent companies as well. NVIDIA, which manufactures market-standard chips for AI processing, posted a record $13B in revenue for Q2 this year alone.

Others are moving quickly as well. Only last month, OpenAI announced a multimodal update to its popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, enabling it to process images, videos, voice, and text, while also having access to current information. Meta unveiled AI-integrated smart glasses, Ray-Ban Stories, pushing the boundaries of wearable computing. Amazon fueled competition by investing up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, marking its assertive move into the AI market, while aiding the development of Anthropic’s advanced AI model, Claude-Next.

With these developments, Lenovo’s latest investment adds to the growing momentum in the AI sector, demonstrating an industry-wide recognition of the potential transformative power of AI technologies.