The US gave a major boost to its nuclear industry yesterday as the Senate passed the ADVANCED (Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy) Act with overwhelming bipartisan support, and as the DoE announced it would fund up to $900 million to support the deployment of small modular reactors (SMRs). The ADVANCED Act is a…
The 2024 edition of the Computex – a Taipei-based electronics show where many Asian companies are usually showcasing their latest motherboards, PC power supplies or laptops – turned into an AI festival last week with a flurry of non-Asian companies taking the stage to pitch their roadmaps, new chips and systems not only for AI…
It’s been an eventful week for the high performance computing and data center industry as many chip makers, including Nvidia and AMD, and data center suppliers announced new products and architectures during the Computex show in Taiwan. Among the flurry of announcements, we view Super Micro’s introduction of liquid-cooled AI racks and bullish expectations about…
There has been a lot of talk lately about the implications of surging AI usage. While the focus has been on electric power consumption, the water intensity of data centers should also emerge as a major challenge going forward. Indeed, AI is catalyzing a shift towards power-hungry “monster chips” that are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain…
Even if it’s a decades-old industry, video games remain an incredibly young business that stands at the forefront of new technologies including, obviously, AI. Since the beginning of the year, AI has been all about multimodal models and notably text-to-video, with OpenAI revealing its generative model Sora. But Google pushed the envelope of what’s possible,…
After some panic selling in recent days sparked notably by the absence of a Super Micro preannouncement, it looks like investor worries could start to ease following a set of strong quarterly figures and encouraging comments from Tesla, Vertiv and Texas Instruments. One of the highlights in the Tesla report was the major ramp-up of…
The disruption caused by Generative AI is not only deeply impacting the Tech industry and (soon) almost any economic activity but it will also have geopolitical, environmental, and energetic consequences. Since the early 2000s, cloud computing has rapidly grown to become the dominant IT platform, delivering any type of digital and/or communication service around the…
Reports have surfaced in the last couple of days about the concerted attempts of large Tech companies including Intel, Qualcomm and Google to break Nvidia’s dominance in data center AI chips by creating an open-source software platform on which developers can build AI models and apps. Indeed, Nvidia’s monopoly on the booming AI training segment…
A lot has been said in the last couple of days about the impressive performances of Nvidia’s latest family of chips, Blackwell. But one thing that has gone largely unnoticed is Nvidia’s shift towards liquid cooling for the first time for the high-end version of its next-generation DGX server subsystem, SuperPOD, that is built on…
At its semi-annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia showcased its latest server-class GPU family, called Blackwell, offering a jump in both computing power and bandwidth and, most importantly, a significant increase in integrated memory. As mentioned in our July 2023 article, memory is the main bottleneck in the training of large GenAI models. As data…