The Next Platform

A lot of companies talk about open source, but it can be fairly argued that Meta Platforms, the company that built the largest social network in the world and that has open sourced a ton of infrastructure software as well as datacenter, server, storage, and switch designs, walks the talk the best. …

With Its Llama API Service, Meta Platforms Finally Becomes A Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Every business has its patterns, and so it is with Google and its hodgepodge of advertising and cloud computing. …

Google Cloud Revenues And Profits Flattening Out was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

It is a tumultuous time for any agency in the US government or any company or organization that depends on the US government for a sizable portion of its funding or revenue. …

If NSF Snoozes, Then TACC’s “Horizon” Supercomputer Loses was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel’s new chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, has his work cut out for him, just like his predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, did several years ago. …

“No Quick Fixes” As Intel Losses And Restructurings Continue was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

We don’t normally spend a lot of time writing about IBM mainframes, but these big iron systems drive a lot of transactions in the world – transactions flush with demographics and context that will feed into AI models – and will be doing native and integrated AI processing for the applications that push those applications. …

IBM Will Catch A Piece Of The GenAI Wave With Next-Gen Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at 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.