New system will bring large-scale AI computing to campus for students, faculty and regional partners
Cal Poly is launching a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Factory that will give students and faculty the power to develop and train advanced AI models on site, while offering regional partners a way to tap into high-performance computing resources to tackle pressing challenges in industry and the community. The system will place the university among a small number of institutions nationwide with the capacity to drive AI development at this scale.
Powered by an NVIDIA DGX B200 BasePOD system and funded through a $3 million investment from The Noyce School of Applied Computing, the system will align Cal Poly with the technology used in NVIDIA’s top-tier data centers and is expected to be fully operational by January 2026.
The AI Factory, to be built in partnership with Mark III Construction, will feature four NVIDIA DGX B200 systems, along with high-performance storage, networking and NVIDIA’s AI software stack. Bringing this computing power directly into Cal Poly’s undergraduate labs and classrooms will open new possibilities for research and project-based learning across disciplines. It also gives the university something commercially available AI platforms cannot: full ownership of the data, models and applications developed on it.
Cal Poly announced the AI Factory during its inaugural AI Convening, co-hosted by the Office of the Provost and the Noyce School of Applied Computing. The event brought together faculty, staff and industry partners to explore the role of responsible, ethical and human-centered AI in higher education. The program included discussions on ethical AI and academic integrity, generative AI for learning design, AI literacy across campus, and a showcase of faculty and staff AI projects.
“The AI Factory exemplifies Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing philosophy, enabling our students and faculty to move beyond using AI to shaping it,” said Al Liddicoat, Cal Poly’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “By connecting the Noyce School’s faculty expertise with state-of-the-art resources, we are preparing students to lead in an AI-driven world and to develop solutions that strengthen our communities.”
The AI Factory will support projects in fields such as agriculture research, energy generation and transportation, environmental monitoring and advanced image processing. With this system, research tasks that once took months on standard hardware, such as analyzing hundreds of thousands of video files, can be completed in days.
“As an endowed school, Noyce exists to drive innovation like this, and this system will let us train our own large language models from the ground up and design applications around them,” said Chris Lupo, founding director of the Noyce School of Applied Computing, which connects computing to disciplines across campus.
According to NVIDIA, the system delivers up to three times the training performance and up to 15 times the inference performance of previous-generation systems, significantly accelerating model development.
“This investment ensures that we won’t just use advanced AI tools; we’ll design and build them,” said Robert Crockett, interim dean of the College of Engineering. “It positions Cal Poly as a leader in applied AI research and education, creating new opportunities for students and faculty and setting a benchmark for what public universities can achieve in this space.”
The AI Factory also removes a major barrier for students and faculty: the high cost of advanced computing resources. Comparable GPU capacity through cloud services can cost individual users thousands of dollars in cloud fees. By operating on-premises, Cal Poly ensures students across all majors, not only computer science, can gain experience building AI systems instead of relying solely on commercial tools.
The system offers enhanced data privacy and a scalable design that Cal Poly can monitor and refine over time, including tools to track its energy use through the university’s solar farm.
The AI Factory will support collaborations across the Central Coast in areas such as agriculture, aerospace, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing. Regional businesses and organizations may be able to leverage the system’s computing power by working with Cal Poly faculty and students to develop AI solutions for complex technical challenges.
By bringing high-performance AI computing to campus, Cal Poly is helping to democratize technology, expanding equitable access to the tools and experiences that prepare all students and faculty to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
About the Noyce School
The Noyce School of Applied Computing is home to the first interdisciplinary school of its kind at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo thanks to a transformative $60 million gift from the Robert N. Noyce Trust.
Housed within the College of Engineering, The Noyce School combines three departments — Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering — with Statistics joining as an affiliate, paving the way for students and faculty using computer principles, concepts and technologies to address real-world problems.
By Emily Slater
