Town of Vail to Deploy HPE AI Solution to Make City Smarter, Safer, and More Sustainable

HOUSTON – The Town of Vail, Colorado, a premier alpine year-around recreational and cultural destination, will adopt the new agentic smart city solution from HPE (NYSE: HPE) to create a sustainable, AI-powered smart city. The deployment advances the town’s smart city initiative, running the AI platform on the town’s own solar and wind-powered data center – demonstrating the city’s commitment to innovation and sustainability without adding complexity or cost.

“We value innovation to provide our community members, employers, and guests with the best Vail has to offer,” said Russell Forrest, town manager of the Town of Vail.

With HPE’s new smart city platform, the Town of Vail will use AI to enhance public safety, accelerate emergency response time, detect wildfires earlier, optimize traffic flow, and streamline repetitive administrative tasks like housing permits and business licensing applications. The town will gain AI-driven 508 compliance to ensure its municipal websites are accessible to people with disabilities, further aligning with federal and state legal requirements. The agentic AI platform will also help the town build stronger connections with residents and visitors with a new 24/7 digital concierge at the town’s library, creating a social hub for real-time, local information.

“As our municipality of 4,300 permanent residents hosts up to 30,000 visitors per day during peak season, we value innovation to provide our community members, employers, and guests with the best Vail has to offer,” said Russell Forrest, town manager of the Town of Vail. “Our new smart city infrastructure from HPE will enable us to considerably improve how we communicate with residents and visitors by eliminating mundane processes, freeing up staff to focus on what matters, making Vail more efficient and responsive for everyone.”

In response to Colorado’s escalating wildfire threat with 11 of the 20 largest fires occurring in the past five years¹, the Town of Vail will use HPE’s new smart city solution to strengthen early wildfire detection and emergency response. The platform leverages AI to analyze drone footage, vegetation health, and seasonal dryness data to predict fire risk, enabling faster, more informed action to mitigate damage and protect lives.

“Climate disasters are not a matter of if, but when, demanding a proactive, hands-on approach to help residents find shelter or evacuate. Weather is unpredictable, but we don’t have to be,” continued Forrest.

Further, as AI adoption accelerates and is projected to consume nearly half of all data center electricity by the end of 2025², the Town of Vail will run the AI platform on a sustainably operated data center. By using renewable infrastructure to support AI workloads, the town illustrates how municipalities can deploy AI responsibly without compromising climate goals.

Integrated Technologies Supporting the Smart City Operations

HPE Agentic Smart City Solution is an easy-to-adopt agentic AI platform for smart cities, developed with NVIDIA, SHI, Kamiwaza and a curated ecosystem of technology partners. It combines digital infrastructure, accelerated computing, enterprise software, and specialized applications to deliver real-time intelligence and modernize the Town of Vail’s IT operations. This creates an AI-ready foundation for the Town of Vail to adopt future workloads such as rental management and parking assistance during peak season, setting a new benchmark for municipal innovation integrating AI, renewable energy and edge computing.

At the core is HPE Private Cloud AI, co-developed with NVIDIA as part of the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio, giving municipalities like the Town of Vail full control over their data and AI models, keeping sensitive information local, secure, and under their own governance. The NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform and NVIDIA RTXPRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs accelerate time-to-first inference and enable real-time performance, while SHI delivers seamless integration and deployment.

Built for scale and sustainability, the platform uses an agentic backend to integrate housing, emergency services, transportation, and other departments. This approach removes operational silos, enables real-time data access, and establishes a unified foundation across departments to run the smart city AI applications on, including:

• BlackShark.ai for geospatial AI and early fire detection
• Kamiwaza for automation, intelligence, and real-time decision-making including accessibility compliance
• ProHawk AI for enhanced computer vision in challenging conditions, and
• Vaidio for deploying video analytics AI agents for real-time response

The software partners came together through HPE’s Unleash AI partner ecosystem, connecting Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to accelerate AI innovation.

Voices Behind the Smart City Innovation

“We are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI – creating safer communities, boosting economic development, and enhancing public services like wildfire preparedness and affordable housing processes,” said Robin Braun, Vice President, AI and Hybrid Cloud Business Development at HPE. “By using secure, sustainable infrastructure to deploy the new agentic smart city solution from HPE, the Town of Vail’s approach proves that municipalities can leverage AI responsibly, demonstrating that cities don’t have to choose between cutting-edge intelligence and environmental stewardship.”

“AI can help municipalities create more connected communities and navigate challenges across infrastructure, sustainability and safety,” said Anne Hecht, senior director, Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA. “With its HPE and NVIDIA AI infrastructure, The Town of Vail is a leading example of how to deploy efficient AI computing and agents to support smarter, faster city operations and services.”

About HPE

HPE (NYSE: HPE) is a leader in essential enterprise technology, bringing together the power of AI, cloud, and networking to help organizations achieve more. As pioneers of possibility, our innovation and expertise advance the way people live and work. We empower our customers across industries to optimize operational performance, transform data into foresight, and maximize their impact. Unlock your boldest ambitions with HPE. Discover more at www.hpe.com