The Next Platform

The quantum computing space is replete with big-name companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel touting incremental but important steps they’re taking to bring the long-promised technology to the fore. …

German HPC Center Is The First Buyer For New D-Wave Quantum Computer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

PARTNER CONTENT: As the technology industry continues its shift towards AI dominance, an important schism is opening up that threatens to impact scientific progress, along with important humanitarian endeavors such as disaster response. …

The Hidden Cost Of Compromise: Why HPC Still Demands Precision was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

While the hyperscalers and big cloud builders all are racing as fast as they can to build the biggest – and presumably the best – models, or collections of models, to win the AI race and become the Microsoft or Red Hat of commercial-grade models, the acquisition of AI hardware and envelope pushing on AI model architecture is not indicative of the adoption of AI by enterprises. …

Cisco Is The Bellwether Of Enterprise AI Adoption was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise last summer introduced the first of its Gen12 ProLiant systems, packed with Nvidia’s latest GPU accelerators and aimed squarely at the rapidly expanding AI space that in less than two years went from prompt-and-respond chatbots to AI agents that can reason, plan, and collaborate on their own. …

HPE Sets Gen12 ProLiant Servers Loose On AI And The Edge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Nvidia may be shipping its “Blackwell” B100, B200, and GB200 compute engines, but not in enough volumes for server maker Supermicro to meet its revenue expectations in the quarter ended in December. …

Extended “Blackwell” GPU Ramp Cools Growth At Supermicro was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

There are two ways to make a programmable switch that can run network applications and accelerate certain network functions. …

Cisco Cuts Network Costs By Welding Nexus Switch To AMD DPU was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

After only a little more than a year of running Intel’s Data Center and AI group – which is probably about as much fun right now as falling down the stairs – Justin Hotard has departed the chip maker to become the next chief executive officer of Nokia, which interestingly enough has a renewed interest in building cloud networks and making money at that. …

Intel Datacenter Chief Departs To Run Nokia – Now What? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

There is a bit of AI spending one-upmanship going on among the hyperscalers and cloud builders – and now the foundation model builders who are partnering with their new sugar daddies to be able to afford to build vast AI accelerator estates to push the state of the art in model capabilities and intelligence. …

Amazon Will Spend Nearly A Year Of AWS Revenue On AI Investments was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

As we have been saying for quite some time, when it comes to datacenter CPUs, we think that homegrown Arm processors (as well as those made by independents Ampere Computing and Huawei Technologies) will eventually represent at least half of the computing capacity that the hyperscalers and major cloud builders install. …

How Much Money Does Arm Make In The Datacenter? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

COMMISSIONED: When it comes to enterprise IT infrastructure, metadata is the secret asset most people don’t think about. …

The Metadata Advantage: Unlocking insights And Efficiency In Enterprise IT was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

People – and when we say “people” we mean “Wall Street” as well as individual investors – sometimes have unreasonable expectations. …

Skepticism About AI Use Does Not Yet Negate The Appetite For AI Hardware was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

When we first started The Next Platform a decade ago, there was not really much of a reason to cover the company’s datacenter efforts. …

AMD Moves Up Instinct MI355X Launch As Datacenter Biz Hits Records was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The only thing that takes longer to bring online slower than a datacenter is a chip foundry, which is unfortunate for a lot of different reasons. …

The Gigabucks Going Into Datacenter Gigawatts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

If Intel hopes to survive the next few years as a freestanding company and return to its role as innovator, it can not afford to waste its time and it cannot afford to make any more mistakes. …

Intel Pushes Out “Clearwater Forest” Xeon 7, Sidelines “Falcon Shores” Accelerator was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Updated with just-announced Intel roadmap changes.

It is often said that companies – particularly large companies with enormous IT budgets – do not buy products, they buy roadmaps. …

The Road Ahead For Datacenter Compute Engines: The CPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

While the hyperscalers and cloud builders provide the best indicator of what it takes to create state of the art GenAI models and the infrastructure to train them as well as to put them into production for practical use through an API interface, perhaps IBM is one of the best leading indicators for how GenAI will slowly be adopted by the enterprises of the world within their own organizations. …

IBM Takes The Patient Path To Future GenAI Profits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

COMMISSIONED: The new year has arrived, bringing with it the usual resolutions: get fitter, read more books, maybe finally tackle that ever-growing email backlog. …

New Year, New Data Strategy: How AI And Scalable Storage Shape 2025’s Resolutions was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

If you think it might be difficult to sell companies general purpose servers when they are frenzied about GenAI and trying to figure out how to get GPU-accelerated systems, you ought to try to convince the same companies to upgrade to Windows Server 2025, which launched last November. …

Azure Can’t Make Up For On Premises Profit Decline At Microsoft was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Almost a year ago, executives, researchers, and developers within the Outshift group of Cisco Systems – an incubation unit focused on such advanced technologies as AI and quantum computing – began batting about the idea of a network infrastructure connecting vast numbers of AI agents from multiple vendors or organizations, allowing those AI agents to automatically communicate, work together, and solve complex problems for enterprises. …

The Coming Age Of The Internet Of Agents was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Maybe they should have called it DeepFake, or DeepState, or better still Deep Selloff. …

How Did DeepSeek Train Its AI Model On A Lot Less – And Crippled – Hardware? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.