Commonwealth Bank has signed up to use EC2 P5 compute instances served out of AWS’ Sydney region, which it will use to power an “AI factory” aimed at moving faster with generative AI.
The bank said in a statement that it is the “first local AWS customer” to use EC2 P5 instances in the AWS Sydney region.
The instances, only relatively new, are powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, and intended for deep learning and other highly compute-intensive use cases.
CBA has been keen to make a bank-wide play with artificial intelligence for several years, aligning with different ecosystems along the way in its quest to realise its ambition.
It previously set up an H2O.ai-powered environment in May last year aimed at enabling safe experimentation with large language models (LLMs).
Called CommBank Gen.ai Studio, the initiative led to 50-plus generative AI use cases as of February this year.
Similar language is now being used in relation to the ‘AI factory’ set up with AWS.
“The AI factory will enable employees to conduct safe testing and development of AI solutions by providing the compute power required to fine-tune and train AI LLMs at increased speeds,” the bank said in a statement.
“This will allow CommBank to provide hyper-personalised and contextualised experiences for customers and communities, more quickly and at scale.”
In addition to EC2 P5 instances, the AI factory makes use of the Amazon SageMaker machine learning managed service.
Chief data and analytics officer Dr Andrew McMullan suggested that the AI factory would enable a four-fold increase in development speed for “AI-powered initiatives”.
“It will empower our engineers and AI scientists to embed AI and Gen AI capabilities in their day-to-day activities enabling increased creativity and output,” he said.
McMullan said that “recent advances” in generative AI promised “significant uplifts to improving customer experience and simplifying core banking operational processes.”
“The technology is advancing quickly, and we need the right infrastructure in place to support our strategic goal of building tomorrow’s bank today for the benefit of our customers,” he said.
“The AI factory will ensure that we are properly set up to leverage this emerging technology effectively.”
CBA is the second major Australian organisation in as many weeks to set up an inhouse ‘factory’ to increase its ability to inject AI into operations.
Seven West Media said it is setting up a factory structure with its own data partner, Databricks.
The use of ‘factory’-like structures was previously seen in the banking sector with cloud adoption, as major banks – CBA among them – sought to rapidly migrate more workloads into the cloud by leaning on repeatable patterns and processes.