For these 25 companies, AI innovation is the name of the game when it comes to the data center, PC and edge computing markets. AI-powered hardware, software, and new agents, features and capabilities are helping enterprises transform their environments.
AI innovation is the name of the game for nearly every tech company in 2025. AI-powered hardware, software, and new AI agents, features and capabilities are being baked into chips, servers, management platforms and storage offerings to help enterprises transform their IT environments to handle AIOps and data management.
Worldwide spending on AI-supporting technologies is expected to surpass $749 billion by 2028 and 67 percent of the projected $227 billion AI spending in 2025 will come from enterprises embedding AI capabilities into their core business operations, surpassing investments in leading cloud and digital service providers, according to research firm IDC’s FutureScape 2025 report. That means that enterprises will be turning to their technology providers and trusted advisers for help incorporating AI into their environments, securely and responsibly.
CRN’s list of 25 companies that are paving the way for the AI revolution in data centers and at the edge include tech behemoths such as Cisco Systems, Intel, Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Chipmakers AMD, Intel and Nvidia also make an appearance on this year’s list with their AI-optimized hardware for the cloud, edge, and data center environments.
At the same time, niche players such as Extreme Networks on the networking side and F5 on the application delivery and security front are bringing their unique technology to the forefront as AI changes the demands placed on enterprise networks everywhere. Also key are the startups on CRN’s list, including data platform provider for cloud and AI Weka, which is making waves in the industry.
As part of CRN’s AI 100, here are the 25 AI companies that are driving AI innovation in the data center and at edge.
Acer
Jason Chen
Chairman, CEO
Acer views AI as one of the biggest areas of opportunity in 2025 as the company plugs away with its AI laptops and PCs that feature specialized hardware with dedicated AI processors. Acer has pledged to expand its AI-powered portfolio in its efforts to enhance, not replace, human capabilities through technology.
AMD
Lisa Su
Chair, CEO
AMD is a leader in the AI world with its AI-focused server processors, graphics cards and accelerators for GenAI. The company generated more than $5 billion from its AI chip segment in 2024, and it plans to start shipping its next-generation Instinct MI350 GPUs in the middle of 2025.
Cisco Systems
Chuck Robbins
Chair, CEO
The world’s largest networking company has been doubling down on AI following its acquisition of Splunk for its AI and observability capabilities. Now, Cisco is working Splunk technology into various pieces of its portfolio, including its multibillion-dollar networking and security businesses.
Cohesity
Sanjay Poonen
President, CEO
Cohesity CEO Poonen—a tech visionary—has transformed the onetime data protection provider into an AI-driven data resiliency/security powerhouse. Poonen’s tech smarts have Cohesity firing on all AI cylinders. The company has tightly integrated robust AI capabilities into a security storage cloud platform built for the AI future.
DDN
Alex Bouzari
Co-Founder, CEO
There’s a reason Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Nvidia is powered by DDN. That’s because DDN has created a next-generation data intelligence platform that supercharges AI data workloads, eliminating bottlenecks. “You build really amazing technology and without DDN, Nvidia supercomputers wouldn’t be possible,” said Huang.
Dell Technologies
Michael Dell
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Michael Dell—an industry icon and perennial tech pioneer and visionary—began selling PCs 41 years ago that powered the PC revolution. Now he is providing an end-to-end portfolio of AI-enabled devices from the desktop to the data center. Dell expects to sell $15 billion in AI servers this year.
Extreme Networks
Ed Meyercord
President, CEO
Extreme Networks’ cloud networking portfolio is helping to power the AI era. The new Extreme Platform ONE brings together networking and security tools, including products from third-party networking and security vendors, such as Microsoft, with AI to radically simplify the network management experience.
F5
François Locoh-Donou
President, CEO
Application delivery and security specialist F5 launched its Application Delivery Controller “ADC 3.0” strategy and its all-in-one application delivery and security platform, which integrates BIG-IP, distributed cloud services and Nginx technology to help enterprises address multi-cloud networking, AI and API security demands.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Antonio Neri
President, CEO
Neri has delivered a blizzard of AI innovation that sets the Silicon Valley crown jewel apart from competitors, including a breakthrough 100 percent fanless direct-liquid-cooled architecture, HPE Private Cloud AI—part of the Nvidia by HPE portfolio—and an expanding AI software portfolio.
Hitachi Vantara
Sheila Rohra
CEO
Rohra has the company laser-focused on leveraging AI to deliver “measurable results” with proven ROI in AI-optimized data centers with big energy efficiency gains, AI-ready infrastructure for retrieval augmented generation and small language models, and supporting the transition to distributed data center models.
HP Inc.
Enrique Lores
President, CEO
HP has been building one of the world’s largest AI PC portfolios with the launch of new business laptops, mobile workstations and small-form-factor desktops. The company began the rollout of its HP Amplify AI program to partners in November, the beginning of its 2025 fiscal year.
Intel
Lip-Bu Tan
CEO
Semiconductor giant Intel has a portfolio full of AI-optimized hardware and AI development tools for the cloud, data center and the edge. The company last fall debuted its Core Ultra 200V processors that were made available for commercial AI PCs in January.
Juniper Networks
Rami Rahim
CEO
Juniper has been shaking up the networking market with its Mist AI technology, which it has woven into its portfolio. Its AI-Native Networking Platform, which was trained on seven years of insight upon its launch in 2024, has been designed to fully integrate AI into a customer’s network operations to make connections more reliable and secure.
Lenovo
Yuanqing Yang
Chairman, CEO
Lenovo prides itself on its vast portfolio of more than 150 AI turnkey offerings and AI-optimized platforms, including PCs and workstations, edge and data center infrastructure. The company in early 2025 unveiled plans to acquire Infinidat, a developer of high-performance storage technology, in an AI storage play.
NetApp
George Kurian
CEO
Kurian has NetApp pushing the AI envelope with 100 AI-specific use case wins in each of the last several quarters powered by a growing number of AI-as-a-Service partners. Kurian says NetApp is well-positioned to bridge the divide between AI systems and enterprise data.
Nutanix
Rajiv Ramaswami
President, CEO
Ramaswami has put partners in the AI fast lane, wooing customers off Broadcom’s VMware with the Nutanix enterprise AIready infrastructure. That offering provides an “out-of-the-box” experience for companies to build AI apps and run the AI model of their choice on an open, compatible API provided by the Nutanix platform.
Nvidia
Jensen Huang
Co-Founder, President, CEO
Nvidia owns several AI-designed architectures, including Grace CPU for large data centers, Hopper GPU for accelerated computing and BlueField DPU for sustainable data centers. It also is partnering with several of the world’s biggest tech providers on AI projects, such as Cisco, for the creation of AI-ready data center networks.
Qualcomm
Cristiano Amon
President, CEO
The chipmaker is fueling an AI channel revolution with its Snapdragon X processors. Backing up the AI innovation is an all-out channel sales offensive that includes a doubling of channel funding this year. The company recently added to its AI arsenal with the acquisition of Edge Impulse, an edge IoT pioneer.
Pure Storage
Charles Giancarlo
Chairman, CEO
Giancarlo has the company locked and loaded to capture the booming AI market opportunity. Among its top AI offerings: Portworx, which is designed to accelerate the deployment of AI applications with a containerized Kubernetes platform, and FlashBlade, a high-performance storage offering for demanding AI environments.
Scale Computing
Jeff Ready
Co-Founder, CEO
Ready has harnessed the company’s prodigious innovation engine to deliver a breakthrough AI edge computing offering that delivers big bang for the buck. Backed up by a 100 percent channel sales model, Scale is taking a bigger chunk of the enterprise market in the wake of Broadcom-VMware changes.
Supermicro
Charles Liang
Chairman, President, CEO
Supermicro continues to break the AI sound barrier with high-performance Nvidia GPU-based systems. The company is supporting Nvidia’s latest and greatest, Blackwell, with a new next-gen liquid-cooled and air-cooled architecture. One sign of its AI success: plans to open a third campus in Silicon Valley.
Vast Data
Renen Hallak
Founder, CEO
Hallak calls the Vast Data platform the OS for AI. That’s because the Vast exabyte data scale platform with high-performance storage, database and containerized compute was built from the ground up for AI workloads. Among its high-profile partners: World Wide Technology, Ahead and Mainline.
Veeam Software
Anand Eswaran
CEO
Veeam has put partners into the AI fast lane with a partnership aimed at integrating Microsoft AI services across the full Veeam portfolio. The expanded partnership comes with Microsoft taking an equity stake. This is on top of a $2 billion secondary offering in December that brings its valuation to $15 billion.
Weka
Liran Zvibel
Co-Founder, CEO
Weka—which ended 2024 with a $1.6 billion valuation and $100 million in annual recurring revenue—is moving at lightning speed to capture what Zvibel calls the “once-in-a-generation” AI opportunity. Weka software powers some of the largest and most complex AI deployments, including 12 of the Fortune 50.
Zebra Technologies
Bill Burns
CEO
Zebra is adding AI muscle to its 56-year legacy of empowering frontline workers with Zebra Companion, a set of AI agents for retail workers, and Zebra Mobile Computing AI Suite. Burns says Zebra is leading the way as customers are rapidly deploying AI into their frontline operations.