In an exclusive interview with CRN, Nvidia Americas Channel Chief Craig Weinstein discusses the common traits among those partners that were honored in this year’s Nvidia Partner Network Awards: ‘It is focused on partners who are aligning with us in our industry go-to-market.’
Nvidia’s Americas channel chief said this year’s award-winning channel partners stand out for embracing the company’s AI infrastructure technologies to help the many enterprises that are still trying to figure out how to best use AI.
These top channel partners were announced Tuesday as the winners of the 2026 Americas Nvidia Partner Network Awards at the AI infrastructure giant’s GTC event in San Jose, Calif.
[Related: Nvidia Puts Groq LPU, Vera CPU And Bluefield-4 DPU Into New Data Center Racks]
“It is focused on partners who are aligning with us in our industry go-to-market and are investing deeply across not only Nvidia’s platform but across the way we go to market with our ecosystem,” said Craig Weinstein (pictured), vice president of Nvidia’s Americas partner organization, in an exclusive interview with CRN.
Among this year’s winners is St. Louis-based solution provider powerhouse World Wide Technology, which took three awards after years of recognition by Nvidia.
There are other repeat winners, like Fremont, Calif.-based distribution giant TD Synnex, Houston-based systems integrator Mark III and the U.S. arm of London-based global consulting giant Deloitte. The list has some newcomers too, such as Mumbai-based LTI Mindtree, Somerset, N.J.-based SHI and New York-based EXL Service.
All of these partners consider Nvidia their most important vendor from a go-to-market perspective or “their most important and potentially the largest from a revenue perspective,” according to Weinstein, who has led the Americas channel since 2016.
“So there’s a balance between helping those partners capture that opportunity, and then their opportunity to monetize that, and we’re just one piece of that opportunity,” he said.
One common trait among these award winners, according to Weinstein, is the “maturity” of their capabilities to provide “deep consultative services” around Nvidia hardware and software products to help enterprise customers take advantage of AI.
“A lot of enterprises are still struggling on where to get started, where to focus, what is the most important area where AI can be applied to be important to the company,” he said. “And so almost all of our winners now have a consultative effort or arm inside of the organization to engage early with enterprise customers.”
These partners also provide presales, delivery and implementation services for enterprise customers investing in their own AI infrastructure, according to Weinstein.
“And then many are moving into managed services,” he added.
The award winners have also embraced Nvidia’s broad ecosystem of ISVs, OEMs and other kinds of companies that provide different types of products and services for AI projects.
“Not every partner has everything that exists inside of their company, and they’re looking to partner with other companies,” Weinstein said. “And so we are seeing a broader set of strategic partnerships get developed across the ecosystem to ensure they can serve that enterprise customer.”
One of the partners, WWT, ranked No. 9 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, won awards this year for AI Excellence, AI Enterprise Software Partner of the Year and Federal Partner of the Year—which Weinstein attributed to its “CEO-led culture that is driving innovation across the entire company globally.” WWT is led by Jim Kavanaugh.
“They’re focused on some really important areas [like] agentic AI. We believe it’s going to be the most important opportunity in the enterprise. Their capability there is a standout,” he said.
Mike Trojecki, area vice president of WWT’s AI practice, agreed with Weinstein.
“Having a CEO who is leading from the top down in AI absolutely contributes to it. Jim said a couple years ago, ‘We’re going to be an AI-first company.’ We focused on that. We built out the practices, but we actually live it every single day,” he told CRN.
Another way many of these partners stand out is their staging capabilities, according to Weinstein, which has become important as a growing number of Nvidia-based data center products require liquid cooling to prevent the underlying chips from overheating.
“We have many partners now in their advanced technology centers that have the ability to deploy liquid-cooled racks in advance of deployment into the enterprise,” he said. “Most customers don’t have the ability to stage that type of infrastructure on their own site or even potentially in a co-location.”
The channel chief pointed to Fremont, Calif.-based solution provider Ahead, which won the Financial Services Industry Partner of the Year award, as a good example of this.
“They just deployed a 10-megawatt data center for staging and configuration, and it has become important to their customers for that differentiated capability. If you spend time with partners, many of them would tell you they have equal capability,” he said.
What follows is Nvidia’s full list of this year’s Nvidia Partner Network award winners:
NPN AI Excellence: World Wide Technology
NPN Rising Star Solution Provider Partner of the Year: SHI
NPN Rising Star Consulting Partner of the Year: LTI Mindtree
NPN AI Enterprise Software Partner of the Year: World Wide Technology
NPN Distribution Partner of the Year: TD Synnex
NPN GSI Partner of the Year: Deloitte US
NPN GSI Tech Innovation Partner of the Year: Ernst & Young
NPN Advanced Technology Partner of the Year: EXL Service
NPN LATAM Partner of the Year: Bull LTDA
NPN Canadian Partner of the Year: Hypertec
NPN Higher Education Partner of the Year: Cambridge Computer
NPN Federal Partner of the Year: World Wide Technology
NPN Healthcare Partner of the Year: Mark III
NPN FSI Partner of the Year: Ahead
NPN Retail Partner of the Year: Accenture
NPN Energy/Utilities Partner of the Year: SoftServe
NPN State and Local Government Partner of the Year: Amsys Innovative Solutions
NPN Networking Partner of the Year: Computacenter
