Teradata AI Unlimited now in public preview on Microsoft Fabric

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

This development allows users of the Microsoft Fabric Workload Hub to trial Teradata AI Unlimited, enabling them to apply analytic functions without affecting their existing Teradata production environments. The platform supports open data formats through OneLake, enhancing interoperability with various tools, and offers the ability to spin down environments when not in use, thereby reducing operational costs.

Teradata AI Unlimited has been designed as a serverless compute engine that integrates with Microsoft Fabric and features ClearScape Analytics. This allows users to access Teradata's analytics capabilities without the necessity of using Teradata VantageCloud. The engine aims to streamline AI innovations at an enterprise scale.

Dan Spurling, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Teradata, commented, "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. 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."

Microsoft Fabric Workload Hub offers users the ability to discover and manage workloads from various independent software vendors (ISVs), including Teradata. Dipti Borkar, Vice President and General Manager, Fabric Strategic ISV & Data Developer Experience at Microsoft, noted, "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."

The integration of Teradata AI Unlimited within Fabric allows for the leveraging of OneLake's shortcuts to data across cloud object stores outside Fabric and Azure, thereby facilitating immediate data availability. This enables data engineers to handle large datasets without influencing the compute resources for production Teradata environments. The serverless system maintains Teradata's capability to process large, complex datasets concurrently.

To aid in the AI/ML model building process, Teradata is implementing an integrated SQL notebook in their AI Unlimited Workload. This notebook comes with predefined use cases that provide developers with templates for rapid-start ideation projects, particularly useful in fields such as financial customer journeys, customer segmentation, and data preparation.

A public preview of Teradata AI Unlimited is available through the Fabric Workload Hub, with a general availability set for 2025, aligning with Microsoft Fabric SDK design requirements, which eases evaluation and purchasing processes for users.