Nvidia’s top partners in the Americas this year are driving sales and services for AI solutions around the vendor’s portfolio of hardware and software for a wide range of verticals, including retail, education, health care, government and manufacturing.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based AI infrastructure behemoth Tuesday unveiled the winners of its 2023 Nvidia Partner Network Americas Partner of the Year awards.

[Related: Nvidia ‘Doubling Down’ On Partners With DGX Cloud Service]

Among the winners are some of the largest solution providers in North America: CDW, World Wide Technology and Insight Enterprises—all of which are on CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500 list. The winners also include distribution giant Arrow Electronics, consulting behemoth Deloitte and up-and-coming solution providers like Lambda and Quantiphi.

In an exclusive interview with CRN, Nvidia Channel Chief Craig Weinstein said the top partners are “doubling down” on their relationships with Nvidia and a broader ecosystem of vendors to build “unique solutions” around AI and accelerated computing.

The accelerated computing practices of these 11 winning partners reflect how Nvidia’s focus is no longer on just selling GPUs but a “full-stack platform” that includes purpose-built GPU systems, high-performance networking components and a growing portfolio of free and commercial software for accelerated computing, according to Weinstein.

“This is not about GPUs anymore. This is about partners understanding Nvidia’s software architecture, from [the] CUDA [parallel programming platform] through our libraries, up to our [software development kits], now packaging that under the umbrella of [Nvidia] AI Enterprise, our software portfolio, and then delivering solutions based upon the customer’s architectural requirements,” said Weinstein, vice president of Nvidia’s Americas partner organization.

Weinstein said the top Americas partners, which are recognized across 13 categories, made the cut based on their investments in accelerated computing and data science, their “rich services capabilities” and their deep understanding of the ecosystem of software and hardware vendors required to serve AI solutions to a variety of industries.

“We’re not trying to create a large, broad ecosystem of thousands and thousands of partners. We want highly specialized, highly skilled and industry domain experts in our ecosystem because that’s what our customers want when it comes to this area of computing,” he said.

What follows are the 11 winners for the 2023 Nvidia Partner Network Americas Partner of the Year across the following categories: distribution, higher education, software, Canadian sales, consulting, rising star, retail, solution integration, health care, public sector, service delivery, AI solutions and networking.