The Next Platform

China has lots of coal but it does not have a lot of GPUs or other kinds of tensor and vector math accelerators appropriate for HPC and AI. …

The Separate But Equal AI Realms Of China And The US was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Last year, amid all the talk of the “Blackwell” datacenter GPUs that were launched at last year’s GPU Technicval Conference, Nvidia also introduced the idea of Nvidia Inference Microservices, or NIMs, which are prepackaged enterprise-grade generative AI software stacks that companies can use as virtual copilots to add custom AI software to their own applications. …

Nvidia NeMo Microservices For AI Agents Hits The Market was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

PARTNER CONTENT: “Developers have to build it, right, and their first concern is to make it work,” says CentML chief executive officer Gennady Pekhimenko. …

Freeing Developers From GenAI Deployment Nightmares was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The semiconductor manufacturing business is absolutely immense. To give the numbers some perspective, in 2024, chip makers generated revenues that were about three quarters of the size of the US defense budget and about two-thirds the size of the social services budget allocated by Congress. …

The Chips Are Definitely Not Down was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The AI boom has been very, very good to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, which is positioned to do well if Nvidia continues with its hegemony over AI training and inference or if the rebel alliance forms behind AMD or if the hyperscalers and cloud builders dedicate a substantial portion of their capital budgets to etching and packaging homegrown compute engines. …

TSMC: The Second Most Profitable Company In The AI Revolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

As part of the pre-briefings ahead of the Google Cloud Next 2025 conference last week and then during the keynote address, the top brass at Google kept comparing a pod of “Ironwood” TPU v7p systems to the “El Capitan” supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. …

Stacking Up Google’s “Ironwood” TPU Pod To Other AI Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making a graphics card for gamers is one thing, but manufacturing a rackscale supercomputer with over 600,000 components that burns 120 kilowatts of power, that has over 5,000 copper cables for an all-to-all interconnect mesh for 72 dual-chip compute engines, and that weighs over 3,000 pounds is another thing entirely. …

Nvidia Sacrifices Profits To Preserve Revenues In The US was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Beleaguered chip maker Intel has been looking for ways to capitalize on non-core, not large, but profitable parts of its business to raise funds for its ambitious plans to revitalize Intel Foundry and to also invest heavily in the Intel Products group. …

Why Did Silver Lake Buy A Majority Stake In Intel’s Altera FPGA Business? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SPONSORED FEATURE: Back before there were AI factories, there were two generations of the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure supercomputer, built by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. …

ABCI Evolves To Meet Japan’s Changing AI Needs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The HPC centers of the world like fast networks and compute, but they are also always working under budget constraints unlike their AI peers out there in the enterprise, where money seems to be unlimited to what sometimes looks like an irrationally exuberant extent. …

Google Woos HPC Centers With Fast CPUs And Networks was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SPONSORED CONTENT  When it comes to artificial intelligence, context is everything. …

The AI Factory: 12,000 Years In The Making, And Absolutely Inevitable was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

If you want to be a leading in supplying AI models and AI applications, as well as AI infrastructure to run it, to the world, it is also helpful to have a business that needs a lot of AI that can underwrite the development of homegrown infrastructure that can be sold side-by-side with the standard in the industry. …

With “Ironwood” TPU, Google Pushes The AI Accelerator To The Floor was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Compute engine makers can do all they want to bring the performance of their devices on par or even reasonably close to that of Nvidia’s various GPU accelerators, but until they have something akin to the NVLink and NVSwitch memory fabric that Nvidia uses to leverage the performance of many GPUs at bandwidths that dwarf PCI-Express switches and latencies that  dwarf Ethernet interconnects, they can never catch up. …

UALink Fires First GPU Interconnect Salvo At Nvidia NVSwitch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It is funny how companies can find money – lots of money – when they think IT infrastructure spending can save them money, make them money, or do both at the same time. …

Dell Tackles AI Infrastructure With Disaggregated Servers And Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Spending on AI systems in 2024 just utterly blew by the expectations of the major market researchers and those who dabble in metrics like we do. …

A Deep Dive Into Datacenter And Server Spending Forecasts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mike Henry was interim chief product officer at AI inference company Groq in 2023, a position that put him in close contact with a lot of datacenter administrators and managers. …

Parasail Brokers Between AI Compute Demand And Supply was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Two weeks ago, before we began our nightmare travels to get to the 2025 edition of Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, we put together an analysis of the AI server and storage spending forecasts put out by the good folks at IDC. …

A Second Opinion On Future GenAI Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel is hosting its Vision 2025 annual event in Las Vegas this week, what we old hands used to call Intel Developer Forum back in the days when the chip maker was taking over more and more of the datacenter and had give the world a relatively inexpensive and uniform substrate on which to build hyperscale infrastructure. …

The Team That Will Implement Intel’s New Vision was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The way that Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang sees it, his company’s role in the ever-emerging quantum computing field is no different than that in other industries where AI and accelerated computing play roles. …

Nvidia Says It Will Be An Accelerator Of Quantum Computing was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The injection of generative AI into the bloodstream of the tech titans and now businesses of all sizes and stripes over the past two years has forced IT vendors, from hardware makers to component providers to enterprise application developers, to quickly rework their roadmaps to address the particular demands of and opportunities presented by this emerging technology. …

Pure Storage FlashBlade//EXA Boosts AI Performance, Scalability was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.