Teradata AI Unlimited platform launches on Microsoft Fabric

Teradata has announced that its AI Unlimited platform is now available for public preview on the Microsoft Fabric Workload Hub.

Teradata AI Unlimited is a serverless compute engine aimed at enhancing the speed of AI innovations for enterprises.

The platform's inclusion in Microsoft Fabric allows users to integrate Teradata's ClearScape Analytics without the need for a traditional enterprise deployment. This strategic move aims to simplify infrastructure requirements and enable users to perform analytics in a more agile manner.

The integration has been designed to take advantage of Microsoft Fabric's existing capabilities, enabling developers, data scientists, and data engineers to conduct AI explorations without impacting their production systems.

This is achieved by offering serverless environments where the infrastructure complexity is removed.

By utilising the Microsoft Fabric Workload Hub, users can trial Teradata AI Unlimited and apply analytic functions without affecting their production Teradata ecosystem. This integration allows the use of open data formats in OneLake and supports open table format architectures for improved interoperability with other tools. Costs can be reduced by deactivating environments when they are not in use, while successful experiments can be seamlessly transitioned into the production phase within a Teradata enterprise setting.

Dan Spurling, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Teradata, commented on the launch.

"Teradata's analytics are well known to be among the most scalable and comprehensive in the industry and AI Unlimited's SaaS offering provides broad access to these capabilities without the need to go through a long procurement or migration cycle," he said.

"The public preview of AI Unlimited for Fabric demonstrates Teradata's commitment to enable trusted AI/ML innovation for developers everywhere. We encourage fans of Microsoft Fabric to access our free trial in the Workload Hub and evaluate Teradata's AI/ML features for themselves, leveraging core Microsoft Fabric services like OneLake."

Dipti Borkar, Vice President & General Manager, Fabric Strategic ISV & Data Developer Experience at Microsoft, added: "Microsoft customers are among the world's most innovative companies, and as they embrace Microsoft Fabric, we want to provide them a range of engines and capabilities they can use on their data including AI/ML engines like Teradata AI Unlimited."

"Developers, data scientists, and data engineers want to explore and run experiments on vast amounts of data as a part of building AI models, including evaluating accuracy and bias."

Incorporated into the Teradata AI Unlimited offering is an integrated SQL notebook containing pre-defined use cases. These are designed to foster rapid AI/ML model development by providing developers with templates for investigation in areas like financial customer journeys, customer segmentation, and data preparation.

The Teradata AI Unlimited for Fabric also uses OneLake's capability to create shortcuts to data stored across various cloud object stores.

This feature makes data immediately accessible, allowing engineers to work with extensive datasets without moving data for each workload. The platform maintains Teradata's scalability, permitting the processing of multiple, billion-row datasets concurrently without taxing the production Teradata environment's compute resources.