Lenovo targets AI and hybrid cloud to drive APAC growth

Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions group (ISG) has set its sights on artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud to fuel its growth in Asia-Pacific (APAC), where enterprises are moving beyond experimental AI projects and want tangible returns on technology investments.

That was according to Sumir Bhatia, president of Lenovo ISG for APAC, who noted that the region has seen “phenomenal growth” in its business from enterprises and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) which are leveraging expertise from Lenovo and its partners in delivering bespoke AI applications and flexible consumption models.

The regional push comes as Lenovo’s infrastructure division continues to perform well globally. In the first quarter of the company’s fiscal year 2025/26, the division’s revenues increased 36% year-on-year to reach $4.3bn. “Our customers are seeing a lot of value in what we’ve been able to deliver,” Bhatia said.

A key factor for Lenovo’s success in the APAC region has been the increasing maturity of AI adoption, where firms are progressing from “extended science projects” to scaling up the usage of AI while tackling challenges that could derail AI initiatives.

“About 12 to 15 months ago, there was a fear of missing out, so companies were all jumping into AI, but they are moving away from that today,” Bhatia said, citing Lenovo’s CIO playbook research which found that the top priorities for IT leaders in the region are governance and ensuring returns on their investments.

Lenovo’s infrastructure offerings cater to two major customer segments. The first comprises organisations that are new to AI and are looking to improve organisational efficiency through AI projects. This includes AI applications for operations, HR and customer relationship management, often using smaller, more focused language models.

The second group are AI adopters that are deploying outcome-based applications, particularly vision AI, for which Lenovo and its partners have implemented projects in areas such as manufacturing quality control, border security and retail self-checkout. “We have examples in Asia-Pacific, including in Australia where large retailers have implemented some of these applications,” he said.

Bhatia also underscored the importance of working with partners, pointing out that no single supplier that can meet all of an organisation’s AI requirements. To that end, Lenovo has introduced an AI innovators programme, which includes more than 50 independent software vendors (ISVs) providing more than 165 AI solutions. Curating and onboarding local ISVs with solutions relevant to specific markets is a key component of Lenovo's regional growth strategy, he added.

At the same time, Bhatia’s team works with their counterparts from the company’s Solutions and Services Group (SSG) to provide client solutions. This can include SSG leading with consulting services for clients unsure of how to begin their AI journey, as well as deploying complex hybrid cloud migrations with partners.

To overcome the significant capital expenditure often associated with new AI infrastructure, Lenovo has been touting its TruScale as-a-service model. This allows businesses to deploy infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis, combining the elasticity of the public cloud with the management of on-premises infrastructure in a hybrid environment.

He cited Australia’s SharonAI, a company that provides graphics processing unit (GPU)-as-a-service offerings, as an example of a customer that scaled its business by leveraging TruScale to manage infrastructure costs and gain access to hardware such as Nvidia’s H100 and L40S GPUs.

Lenovo is also supplying its infrastructure offerings to the world’s largest hyperscale cloud providers, as well as local sovereign cloud players, particularly as more companies start to repatriate some workloads such as SAP from public clouds to gain more control and manage costs.

Overall, Bhatia remained bullish about the widespread growth he sees across the APAC region, compared to a few years ago when only one or two markets were leading the charge. “All our markets are really on fire right now,” he said. “Our journey of being able to provide infrastructure to the large AI farms, as well as enterprises that are just getting into AI, is going extremely well.”