The Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team has assembled more AI partners than any of its rivals on the Formula 1 grid.
With partnerships spanning compute, security, data, engineering and integration, the plan is for all of the AI companies to coexist within the Aston Martin framework.
At the team’s recent AMR Technology Forum, Eric Ernst, Commercial Technology Ambassador, walked the room through what he called one of the most diverse technology ecosystems in the sport.
Ernst joined the team five months ago and has spent that time articulating a single idea: the partners are not there to compete with each other.
“When you go and look at trying to solve a problem, you get a really good momentum to solve this problem,” Ernst said.
“Once that momentum is really going and you know each other and you’re working, that’s where you can really start getting the gains.”
Ernst has previously described the stack in bodily terms – Arm as silicon foundation, NetApp moving data like blood to the brain, Cohere reasoning at the centre. He has also framed the current moment as historically familiar rather than unprecedented.
“There’s a good analogy done by someone much smarter than me, which confirms we’ve been at this point before,” Ernst said.
“This is what Gutenberg created for the press. You can put medicine knowledge into a book. We’re kind of at that stage again with humanity – a superpower shift, I’ll call it.”
The framing recurred across Aston Martin’s AI partners when Sector spoke to them individually: an ecosystem built from deliberately different layers, not a collection of companies each trying to own the same territory.
Compute and the data beneath it
CoreWeave, Aston Martin’s Official AI Cloud Computing Partner, provides the computing scale behind the team’s AI ambitions, running the infrastructure that some of the world’s largest AI model builders rely on.
Ben Richardson, Managing Director and Vice President of Strategy at CoreWeave, explained how the partnership functions as proof to its own customers as much as to Aston Martin.
“It’s not about talking about what we’re going to do, it’s about doing what we’re going to do,” he said.
“The power that you have with a team like Aston Martin on the track is bringing together all those different data points.”
Richardson placed the wider AI shift early in its cycle, rather than treating Aston Martin’s stack as a finished picture.
“I often get asked, where are we in the cycle – is this the higher cycle, or through it?” Richardson said. “I always use the US example, that we’re probably at the top of the second. This is just starting. We’re just picking up.”
Meanwhile, NetApp sits beneath that layer, managing where the team’s data actually lives – trackside, in the cloud, and at mission control. Chief Marketing Officer Gabie Boko described the scale involved on a single race weekend.
“For us, with Aston Martin, it’s 1.5 terabytes on race day,” she said.
“For us, with a healthcare company, it could be 50 petabytes over the course of a month. The difference is the speed.”
Boko was direct about what ties every partner in the stack together, regardless of their individual role.
“If you took all of us away, the one thing that remains is the data,” Boko said.
“For Aston Martin, it’s winning, it might be faster track time, faster curve time. For healthcare companies, it’s completely different – it’s about patient service.”
As Aston Martin’s Official Generative AI Partner, Cohere occupies the reasoning layer above both. Ryan Lewis described Cohere’s role as making Aston Martin’s data legible enough to act on quickly.
“We help the F1 team make faster, more accurate decisions that are cited,” Lewis told Sector.
“Your brain doesn’t send a scattershot of thoughts to you. Your brain sends a clear signal of what you need to do in that moment. That really is what Cohere is doing.”
Lewis was explicit that Cohere’s usefulness depends on the other partners around it, rather than trying to do their jobs itself.
“We have a partnership already with someone like CoreWeave – we work with them very closely for training and then we also deploy our agentic platform in their environment,” Lewis said.
“Everyone plays off of each other really well.”
Lewis also pointed to what the Aston Martin name itself brings to the relationship, beyond the technical fit.
“Aston Martin has been a brand that’s been around for years and years,” Lewis said. “It’s done a lot just by connecting us into this ecosystem, but also being associated with a brand that’s known for quality.”
Keeping the stack secure
The most recent addition to Aston’s technical team is Global Cybersecurity Partner Zscaler, and Chief Marketing Officer Sunil Frida explained how the announcement had an immediate commercial effect.
“We went up a billion dollars after our announcement with Aston Martin,” Frida said.
Zscaler secures roughly 46 per cent of the global Fortune 500 and processes around 750 billion transactions daily, with Frida offering a specific example of why security matters in an environment generating this much live data.
“I was watching the back of the car in Miami, and two guys came in and gave Fernando (Alonso) a piece of paper with graphs and data,” Frida said.
“In my mind, I was thinking, can you imagine if a rogue agent got in that garage and shut that data down?
“True speed comes from control – discipline gives you real freedom.”
Frida also explained the underlying principle behind Zscaler’s approach, known within the company as Zero Trust.
“If you come into a building, get a badge and walk right up to your meeting room, then walk right back down instead of roaming around – Zero Trust is that same analogy,” Frida told Sector.
“It makes your house disappear. When your house is no longer reachable, your enterprise is not going to be reachable.”
Frida said the scale of Zscaler’s existing client base, rather than the technology alone, was central to what it now brings Aston Martin.
“We secure 46 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies – we’ve learned a lot from what works and what doesn’t work, and we’ve used that in our products,” Frida said.
“So we’re transferring some of that knowledge to a team like Aston Martin.”
Making the ecosystem usable
Several partners occupy what might be called the integration layer – translating the other layers into something the team, and its fans, can actually use.
Cognizant, Aston Martin’s Official AI Services Partner, works to stitch the rest of the stack together, according to David Ingham, the company’s Head of Media, Entertainment and Sport.
He told Sector that legacy infrastructure, not new technology, is usually the actual constraint teams face.
“It’s when they bring in new partners like CoreWeave or Cohere that need access to data – maybe the ERP they have is five years old,” Ingham said.
“How do they move data around, how do they get performance data, wind tunnel data, quickly between all of these systems?”
Ingham described one of Cognizant’s core projects with the team as a data strategy exercise: mapping where information is generated and stored internally, and how quickly it can move across departments.
“So that you can get the trackside data back, run it through the simulator, run scenarios through the wind tunnel, in a quick cycle,” he said.
“When a new partner comes in, we’d be looking at what that technology is, does it replace something or is it additive, and what it needs internally.”
Cognizant’s presence on the ground fluctuates with the scale of the project, Ingham told Sector, from a handful of people up to five times that on larger pieces of work.
“At the moment maybe we have half a dozen to a dozen people working with them – in the past it’s been as high as 50 or 60 individuals when we’re doing chunkier projects,” Ingham explained,
Current work includes applying AI to the team’s fan database for more personalised messaging, and building a digital twin of the factory to track material stock and machine capacity in real time.
Ingham said the partnership functions as a reference point for Cognizant’s clients well beyond motorsport.
“It’s a great test bed for us to show other clients in finance, in insurance, in media – that if we can gain marginal gains here in order to move up the grid, then absolutely we can do it in their environments,” Ingham said.
He credited Aston Martin’s Chief Commercial Officer, Jefferson Slack, with structuring the partner roster deliberately enough to avoid overlap between companies – a contrast, he said, with how some other sports handle technology sponsorship.
“I’ve been in and around other sports where they’ll bring in IBM or AWS and just brand them ‘the technology partner’ – and that cuts off all these other categories, because technology is such a wide range,” Ingham said.
“What Aston Martin has done is say, we are the AI services partner, they brought in a cloud partner, they brought in AI compute partners, an orchestration layer, cybersecurity partners.”
Elsewhere, Cognition provides the agentic software engineering layer, building AI tools that take on chunks of engineering work directly rather than simply assisting with it.
Cognition’s Senior Vice President of Operations and People, Emily Cohen, believes the shift changes what teams actually delegate, not just how fast they work.
“All of our engineers, they’re already working 24-7, you shoot off to your agents before you go to bed,” Cohen said.
“The reason engineering managers really picked it up quite quickly is because they were already used to this way of working – they were used to delegating chunks of work to people on their team.
“So when we started delegating chunks of work to agents, it came very naturally to them.”
Cohen offered a comparison to explain why she sees the shift as additive rather than a threat to headcount.
“If all of a sudden your sales reps could be 10x more efficient, you’d probably want 10x more sales reps instead of 10x fewer,” Cohen said. “They’d just be significantly better at their jobs and able to create much more value. I see a similar thing here.”
ServiceNow has worked with the team since 2023, longer than most of the AI-specific partners, focused on operations rather than the track itself, with Chief Transformation Officer Simon Cox describing the role as invisible but critical.
“We kind of call ourselves the team behind the team,” he said.
“A lot of the work we do is making sure that in partnership with Aston Martin, we’re looking at all the other things that actually the public don’t see on track day, but are just so vital to making the whole operation work.”
Cox also pushed back on the idea that organisations need their data perfectly organised before adopting AI tools.
“We see a lot of enterprises almost getting slightly paralysed by the concern that their data’s not accurate,” he said.
“The most successful ones are the ones that embrace that and say, we’ll fix it as we go. If you don’t start, others are going to go flying past you.”
Then Xerox brings a different kind of integration – physical and digital – built on a print heritage the company is actively reframing through the partnership.
Nikki Hartley, Operations Manager, told Sector the relationship has expanded well beyond its original brief.
“We’re the global print partner – we support them around the world on the race locations,” Hartley explained.
“But it’s also opened doors to many different opportunities. When you talk about fan engagement, when you talk about that bridge between physical and digital, we’ve now got some exciting developments with them.”
Hartley also pointed to something rarer in F1’s partner ecosystem than the technology itself: partners who are already each other’s customers.
“We talked about Zscaler having 46 per cent, we’re one of that 46 per cent, so we’re customers of them and they’re customers of us already,” Hartley said.
“ServiceNow, too. We’re a big customer of ServiceNow.”
Hartley said the partnership also gives Xerox access to a younger audience than its traditional print heritage typically reaches.
“Being a heritage brand, we don’t necessarily have that same loyalty, awareness from a slightly younger demographic,” Hartley told Sector.
“Tapping into that market, and the storytelling that comes with it, is a big part of our objective from the partnership.”
The human layer
Not every partner in Aston Martin’s ecosystem is optimising the machine. Two operate at the level of the people running it.
Eight Sleep, a sleep technology company, is the outlier in a stack otherwise built from enterprise infrastructure – a consumer brand whose product adjusts bed temperature through the night.
Rafael Oliveira, Vice President of International Marketing and Partnerships, laid out what Eight Sleep offers to Aston Martin.
“Our clinical studies show up to 34 per cent more deep sleep, 45 per cent reducing snoring, 25 per cent fewer wake-ups during the night,” Oliveira said.
“We know that the tired brain for everyone in the room makes measurably worse decisions. When you bake all of that in, it can actually lead to meaningful competitive advantage.”
Oliveira said the product’s value lies in adapting to the individual rather than applying a single fixed setting.
“There’s no secret bullet, it’s not one-size-fits-all,” Oliveira said. “Our body changes temperature throughout the night – if you have one flat temperature, that simply won’t work. We need to do hyper-personalisation to make sure your sleep is the best.”
Arm is Aston’s Official AI Compute Platform Partner but for all the technical aspects it brings to the team, Head of Brand and Creative Jonathan Armstrong backed the human element of AI.
“AI can deconstruct complex problems. It can accelerate thinking,” Armstrong said.
“But human insight, human ingenuity, creativity, collaboration – you can’t beat that. AI can’t create that.”
Armstrong also connected that view to Arm’s approach beyond the technology itself, pointing to the team’s work supporting women in motorsport as part of the same philosophy.
“Technology has removed the barriers – AI is clearly giving people greater opportunity to knowledge, to accessing complex things,” Armstrong said. “But we need people within companies from diverse backgrounds so that people can see themselves in those individuals and be inspired.”
Ernst made a similar point when asked whether the wider AI shift threatened jobs across the team.
“They’re not going to replace us,” Ernst said.
“The data shows the map, and the AI can show the trajectory. And the human needs to decide whether or not we’re going to go faster or whether it goes slower.”
For Aston Martin, the overall goal of having such a strong AI partnership portfolio is certainly to go faster.
