Ready to innovate without the risk? Find your breakthrough at SHI’s AI & Cyber Labs

From our vantage point inside the SHI AI & Cyber Labs, we talk to IT leaders every day. The pressure on your teams is immense: Deliver on the promise of AI, prove the ROI — but the last thing you need is another failed pilot that burns through budget and credibility.

After working with hundreds of enterprise IT teams over the past two years, we’ve witnessed the same pattern. Organizations rush into AI deployments without proper validation, only to hit integration roadblocks, security gaps, or performance issues that could have been caught early.

But here’s what we’ve also seen: The teams that do properly validate deploy AI solutions 40% faster than their peers, with fewer post-deployment issues, and they’re building game-changing, competitive advantages.

In SHI’s AI & Cyber Labs, we have created a space where innovation, experimentation, and enterprise enablement converge — but more importantly, where you can actually break things safely in testing before they break in production. Here, you’re empowered to explore the full potential of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, without the risks.

The vision behind SHI’s AI & Cyber Labs

Our AI & Cyber Labs were born from a simple but powerful idea: to give organizations a safe, scalable, and cutting-edge environment to test, build, and deploy AI and cybersecurity solutions.

But the labs also came from frustration. Too many came to us after costly failures, asking, “Why wouldn’t this work with our existing systems?” Now, our customers are asking different questions: “How quickly can we scale this to other departments?” and “What’s our next AI opportunity?”

“The introduction of SHI’s AI & Cyber Labs will empower many organizations to bring both clarity and speed to their AI efforts, helping them identify use cases with strong ROI and the best way to achieve the shortest time to value,” said Thai Lee, SHI President and CEO. “With the new AI & Cyber Labs, we are fulfilling our ongoing promise to help our customers solve what’s next.”

Alongside distinguished guests, partners, and customers, SHI celebrated the ribbon-cutting of a space built to accelerate innovation.

Whether you’re a CIO exploring generative AI or a CISO preparing for the next wave of cyber threats, the labs provide the tools and expertise to turn ideas into action. They help you answer the hard questions your board will ask: “How do we know this will actually work? What’s our risk exposure? What happens when this scales?”

Working with leading OEMs, we’ve built an enterprise-grade environment and experience where you can identify and validate high-impact AI use cases and stress-test solutions against your workflows, data, and security requirements. Our testing environment reflects your actual production environment, spanning multiple clouds, systems, and security controls. We’ve learned the devil is always in the integration details — that’s where most AI projects stumble. Here, you can ‘fail fast, win faster,’ increasing the probability of a successful deployment where it counts.

What the labs offer: Core capabilities

SHI’s AI & Cyber Labs are more than just a tech showcase — imagine a fully operational innovation hub, designed to accelerate your AI journey from ideation to deployment. We take a different approach because we’ve encountered too many “innovation labs” that often just serve as glorified demo rooms.

1. Generative AI sandbox

Explore the latest in large language models (LLMs), computer vision, and multimodal AI. Test real-world use cases like document summarization, chatbot development, and intelligent automation using your actual data, with your security policies, against your performance requirements. We’ve built environments that mirror the complexity of real enterprise deployments. Your benefit: working prototypes, performance benchmarks, and cost models that fast-track deployment decisions.

2. Cybersecurity simulation and testing

Run security exercises and testing, simulate advanced persistent threats (APTs), and evaluate your security posture in a controlled environment. Recently, we helped a financial services customer discover that their proposed AI chatbot would have inadvertently exposed customer data through a seemingly innocent query pattern. The takeaway? Stronger security validation that satisfies compliance requirements and builds stakeholder confidence.

3. High-performance data infrastructure

Leverage enterprise-grade compute, storage, and networking powered by NVIDIA GPUs and SHI’s robust architecture to support AI workloads at scale. We’re not talking about laptop demos — we’re running the same hardware configurations you’ll need in production, so you can actually validate performance and cost projections.

4. AI workbench for rapid prototyping

Build, train, and deploy AI models using pre-configured environments and curated datasets — ideal for proof-of-concept (POC) development and pilot testing. The key difference? We help you test integration with your existing systems from day one, creating working solutions that integrate seamlessly and dramatically reduce deployment timelines.

Partnerships that power innovation

Here’s what separates us from other testing environments: Our labs offer the latest AI technology and tools to accelerate AI development and deployment. We’ve partnered with leading providers to deliver a hands-on experience, equipped with next-generation solutions, including:

• Multi-cloud testing environments: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure with cross-cloud connectivity. We can replicate your exact cloud configuration, including those hybrid setups that make demos crash.
• Enterprise-grade infrastructure: NVIDIA DGX H200s and Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. Try the same gear you’ll be buying, configured the way you’ll actually deploy it.
• Security-first approach: Integration with tools from Cisco, Okta, and Palo Alto Networks. We test security integration from the start, not as a bolt-on addition.

Test drive state-of-the-art AI technology and benchmark performance while running your AI models and solutions. Get compute power from top OEMs, choose from storage platforms, explore networking, and leverage security tools from industry leaders. We’ll help you document everything — performance metrics, integration requirements, security findings — so you have the evidence you need for your deployment planning. See the latest cooling technologies being deployed in the data center and how they perform.

Find your next breakthrough in the labs

Whether you need a workshop, a POC, or a full-scale pilot, SHI’s team of experts is on deck. We’re not trying to sell you anything specific; the aim is to help you succeed with whatever solution works for your environment. You’ll have access to hundreds of our AI-certified architects, data scientists, and engineers, delivering:

• Specialized support to engineer and scale generative AI applications that actually integrate with your existing systems.
• Expert guidance in decision-making, lab testing, customization, and integrations based on what we’ve learned from similar deployments.
• A vendor-neutral, structured approach for environment replication, testing, evidence-based planning, and enterprise documentation that will satisfy your most skeptical stakeholders.

We help with AI readiness assessments, AI literacy and adoption services, AI use case workshops, two-week targeted POCs, six-week solution testing, custom programs, and more. The goal is always the same: give you the confidence and documentation you need to move forward — or the evidence you need to pivot before you waste resources. Move easily from imagination and experimentation to full-scale implementation; our labs are co-located with SHI’s Data Center Factory (DCF), enabling an end-to-end solution approach to global procurement, testing, and deployment of AI infrastructure.

“Every organization is on a unique AI journey, said Jack Hogan, SHI Vice President of Advanced Growth Technologies. “SHI’s next-generation generative AI lab allows SHI to meet customers where they are on that journey, at any stage or onramp, through a consultative, collaborative, experimentation-as-a-service approach.”

Remember, AI isn’t magic, and it’s not going to solve every problem. But when implemented thoughtfully, with proper testing and validation, it can deliver transformative results. Ready to see the labs for yourself? Book a tour to start exploring what’s possible. You can schedule lab sessions (virtual or in-person), access curated AI tools and datasets, and receive hands-on training and support.

As the technology landscape evolves, SHI’s labs will continue to serve as a launchpad for AI innovation and expand with new capabilities. We’re constantly adding new testing scenarios based on what we see in the field — because your challenges are evolving, and our capabilities need to evolve with them.

Whether you’re just starting your AI journey or looking to fortify your cybersecurity strategy, SHI’s AI & Cyber Labs offer the ideal test environment to solve what’s next. Reach out to one of our experts to begin your experience.