ASUS wants to give companies more control over the security of their data when using generative AI tools. To this end, the tech giant is introducing the AFS Appliance server, a dedicated AI server that companies can install in their own data center environment. The AFS Appliance includes Nvidia A100 GPUs on board and is offered on a rental basis. The most expensive model of the AFS Appliance, based on the Nvidia DGX AI supercomputing platform, is likely to have a rental price of $10,000 per month. Remarkably, the dedicated server runs its own LLM model called the ‘Formosa Foundation Model’, which would have the same capacity as GPT 3.5. The model would mainly generate texts based on traditional Chinese language structures, indicating that the AFS Appliance is probably mainly focusing on the Chinese market at the moment. It is not yet known when the ASUS AFS Appliance will be available, but the tech giant wants to have between 20 and 30 Taiwanese customers first and expand internationally by the end of this year.
