Latest news with #datacenter
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Computex 2025 — AI Hardware Galore, GPUs Front And Center
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joins MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai on stage at Computex 2025. Computex Taipei 2025 was busier than expected, with big announcements from the world's most prominent silicon vendors and their customers and partners. While the show is predominantly focused on PCs, this year it had a lot of enterprise and datacenter announcements as well. I attended last year's show in person, and the usual cast of suspects came out with announcements this year as well. While lots of component vendors had a bevy of announcements, too, here I want to focus on the big silicon vendors and OEMs. NVLink Fusion, which allows third-party silicon vendors to use NVLink interconnect with Nvidia GPUs, is one of the most significant announcements that I can think of this year. This is mainly because it shows the dominance that Nvidia has in the AI space, especially when it comes to infrastructure. As one indicator of this, Nvidia already has partners like MediaTek, Marvell, AIchip, Astera Labs, Synopsys and Cadence onboard to adopt this technology. In the meantime, Nvidia has also announced that Fujitsu and Qualcomm datacenter CPUs will support NVLink Fusion, enabling their CPUs to work with Nvidia's GPUs. This opens Nvidia's ecosystem to a broader array of partners and reduces customers' reliance on a completely Nvidia stack of CPUs, GPUs and interconnects. Interestingly, the list of partners doesn't include AMD or Intel, which are directly competing with Nvidia in the datacenter. Nvidia also announced the RTX 5060, which is the company's mainstream gaming GPU. This card is supposed to sell for $299, making it the most accessible in the RTX 5000 series. (I reviewed the RTX 5090, the top end of this product line, earlier this year.) Since the xx60 series cards tend to be Nvidia's highest-volume models, this is an important release for the company. Currently, the RTX 4060 laptop, RTX 3060 and RTX 4060 are the three most popular GPUs on Valve's Steam Charts. Nvidia bills the RTX 5060 as a GPU for 1080P gaming, which makes sense when you consider that 55% of all Steam gamers still use 1920 x 1080 — although 1440P is gaining steam, with nearly 20% of the gaming base. That is all to say that gamers looking for that tier of card are likely to expect a considerable performance improvement over much older generations. Nvidia is leaning heavily on frame-gen to show performance increases, and without that, the performance difference of the 5060 over the 4060 looks meager at times. One of the biggest critiques is that the new model is an 8GB card, which is likely to degrade its performance in higher resolutions and in future capabilities. Delving further into the NVLink Fusion announcement, Qualcomm has only recently started to take the covers off its upcoming datacenter CPU product, so it seems that Nvidia doesn't quite consider Qualcomm a threat as much as a potential growth opportunity. Details are still fairly light, but the expectation is that this server CPU will be an Oryon-based Arm processor that harkens back to the early days of Nuvia before Qualcomm acquired it. Now, Oryon DNA is in virtually everything Qualcomm makes and will enable the company to expand into the datacenter, where it hasn't ever really had a presence outside of its Cloud AI 100 accelerator. Speaking of the Cloud AI 100, Qualcomm and Dell announced a new Dell Pro Max Plus PC that leverages a special 75-watt TDP version of the AI 100 for use inside of a laptop with 64GB of RAM. This enables the end user to run up to a 109B-parameter model on-device without cloud computing. While this discrete NPU will not enable Copilot+ experiences on this PC, it will run models that would otherwise not be possible with any of Nvidia's current mobile GPUs, which are limited to 24GB of RAM. Not to be outdone by Nvidia and Qualcomm, AMD also launched its Radeon RX 9060 XT at Computex, targeted at the same $299 mainstream price point. This is AMD's mainstream card designed to compete directly with Nvidia's RTX 5060 series. AMD also justified its 8GB card by saying that 1080P gamers simply don't need more RAM, though it did enable board partners to ship 16GB variants for a $349 MSRP. In addition to a new mainstream GPU, AMD also teased the next generation of its Threadripper workstation CPUs. Threadripper is known as a 'high-end desktop' or HEDT part and is mainly for content creators and developers. The Ryzen 9 9995WX is a 96-core CPU with peak boost clocks of 5.4 gigahertz and a 350-watt TDP. AMD also offers a non-Pro Threadripper series with up to 64 cores, which I expect will focus more on content creation and AI development. AMD revived its high-performance reputation with the Threadripper series, and I believe that Threadripper keeps that spirit alive even though EPYC (datacenter) and Ryzen for gaming have both captured their respective performance crowns. I'm a big fan of Threadripper for video production and wouldn't mind having a ton of Zen cores to throw at any video rendering workload. That said, AMD has already upped the ante quite a bit with its 3-D V-Cache (X3D) memory for its consumer Ryzen parts and taken the performance crown in gaming and content creation. One of Threadripper's greatest attributes is the number of PCIe 5.0 lanes it offers (128), which enables multiple high-end GPUs in a single system and class-leading PCIe Gen 5 SSDs. I wish consumer platforms had more PCIe lanes; I keep having to compromise on storage because there are only so many lanes available (24) on my 9800X3D, with 16 lanes automatically going to my GPU. Not to be left behind, Intel also had some new GPUs to announce, but not for the mainstream. That's because Intel has already launched its Arc B series for mainstream gamers with the Arc B580, which retails for around $299 and offers 12GB of memory. Instead, at Computex Intel moved the Arc series toward the enterprise with two new GPUs specifically aimed at AI applications, the Arc Pro B50 and B60. The B50 provides 16GB of VRAM at around $299, while the B60 offers 24GB of VRAM and performs similarly to the Arc B580 consumer card but with double the memory capacity for AI tasks. Some of Intel's board partners are also building dual-GPU cards with 48GB of RAM to push the AI envelope further. Intel also announced a workstation platform called Battlematrix that will allow up to 192GB of VRAM in a single system via multiple Arc GPUs to run larger models (70B parameters and up). While Intel didn't hold a press conference at Computex this year, it did have a demo room showing multiple demos running on Intel's Panther Lake processors. Intel also reiterated that the company is on track to deliver the first Panther Lake designs in the second half of this year with volume production next year, on schedule with Intel's previous announcements. The demos at Computex showed Panther Lake running DaVinci Resolve AI masking and a few other AI-enhanced features. Intel also demoed photo upscaling from Topaz Labs, a popular ISV for Intel, when showing off new silicon capabilities. You can get a walk-through of all three live demos on Intel's YouTube channel. Last but certainly not least was MediaTek, which held one of the main Computex keynotes with CEO Rick Tsai, who was joined on stage at the end by Nvidia's Jensen Huang. One of the biggest announcements that Tsai made was the upcoming production of MediaTek's next-generation chip utilizing TSMC's 2nm process node; the company expects the first high-volume device to tape out in September. MediaTek expects the 2nm production node to deliver a 15% performance improvement or a 25% power reduction versus the 3nm node. Tsai also spoke about future nodes from TSMC, including A16, A14 and 'whatever after that.' It is also essential to know that MediaTek is an Intel Foundry customer, with competing nodes coming soon from Intel. Tsai also spoke about the importance of MediaTek's relationship with Nvidia, and detailed MediaTek's role in designing the powerful 20-core Arm CPU inside the new Nvidia GB10 chip for the DGX Spark Supercomputer with 10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725 cores. Additionally, MediaTek's fledgling ASIC business can capitalize on MediaTek's relationship with Nvidia to leverage NVLink Fusion where appropriate for its ASIC customers. Tsai's relationship with Huang and Nvidia was also center stage when he gave night market fruit to Huang, which I thought was a fun callback to Huang's keynote last year, where he spoke about the night market and about a specific fruit vendor. This year's Computex had a slower pace than last year, but it wasn't without exciting announcements from all the major AI silicon vendors. Some of the biggest announcements came in the form of enterprise announcements like Nvidia's NVLink Fusion, but there were still plenty of consumer products announced, like the RTX 5060 and RX 9060. We also got plenty of new CPU announcements from AMD and Qualcomm, even though those products will likely be available further down the road. In my view, Computex focused heavily this year on filling the gaps in companies' product lineups and satisfying the needs of consumers and enterprises, whether at the high end with the Dell Pro Max Plus or at the low end with the entry-level gaming cards from Nvidia and AMD. Computex sets up the second half of 2025 for plenty more product announcements based on all this new silicon.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
TNB Tech Minute: Amazon Invests Billions in Australian Data Centers - Tech News Briefing
Full Transcript This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated. Victoria Craig : Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Monday, June 16th. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. Amazon said it will allocate $13 billion to expand its data center infrastructure in Australia as it looks to meet the boom in global demand for AI computing. The tech titan said the investment, which is the biggest publicly-announced investment from a global tech provider, will strengthen the nation's cloud computing and AI capabilities. To support the expansion, amazon said it's also investing in three new solar farms. Elsewhere, Southwest Airlines is adding a new cockpit alert system to help pilots avoid dangerous situations. The system designed by Honeywell delivers verbal warnings and text alarms if a pilot is about to use the wrong runway or takeoff from or land on a taxiway. Those alerts are similar to car warning systems that detect other cars in blind spots or alert a driver if they're about to back into another car. The new system comes after carriers navigated close calls at US airports in recent years. And finally, crypto billionaire, Justin Sun will take his Tron Group public through a reverse merger with a small Nasdaq-listed toy company. SRM Entertainment will be renamed Tron and Sun has been named an advisor to the company. Today's announcement comes after Sun attended a dinner last month with President Trump, a gala thrown for the biggest shareholders of his meme coin. A few months ago, as part of a broader rollback of crypto enforcement under the Trump administration, the SEC asked the court to pause a fraud lawsuit against Sun and three of his companies. He faced charges that accused him of manipulating the market for Tron's TRX Token. Sun has called the lawsuit meritless. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out Tuesday's Tech News Briefing podcast.
Wall Street Journal
5 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Amazon to Invest Nearly $13 Billion in Data Centers in Australia
Amazon AMZN -0.53%decrease; red down pointing triangle plans to invest about $13 billion to expand its Australian data center infrastructure, as it seeks to meet the boom in global demand for artificial-intelligence computing. The investment of 20 billion Australian dollars, the equivalent of $12.97 billion, through 2029 will strengthen the country's cloud computing and AI capabilities to support strong demand from customers, the Seattle-based tech giant said Saturday.
Bloomberg
6 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Amazon Plans $13 Billion Investment in Australia Data Centers
Inc. plans to invest A$20 billion ($13 billion) in Australia between this year and 2029 to develop its data-center infrastructure. The commitment would support the growth in demand in Australia for cloud computing and AI, for which it would speed up adoption and capability, Amazon said in a statement.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Aslan Energy Capital and JIEP Sign Heads of Agreement to Develop East Jakarta's Renewable-Powered Hyperscale Data Center
JAKARTA, Indonesia, June 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Aslan Energy Capital (AEC), a Singapore-based developer of clean energy infrastructure, has signed a binding Heads of Agreement (HoA) with Jakarta Industrial Estate Pulogadung (JIEP) to develop the Aslan Jakarta Data Centre (AJDC)—a state-of-the-art, 40-megawatt hyperscale co-location facility powered entirely by certified renewable energy. Strategically located in East Jakarta within the JIEP industrial zone, AJDC will sit on a 40,000 m² site and is designed to house up to 7,000 server racks. The Tier 4 data center will be operational by Q4 2027 and will feature adequate redundancy for all critical systems, ensuring maximum uptime and operational resilience. In a landmark move for Jakarta's data infrastructure, the facility will also integrate a 120 MW-hour Battery Energy Storage System and draw its primary power supply from renewable energy sourced thru the JIEP collaboration, demonstrating a robust commitment to energy sustainability and climate-aligned growth. AJDC is being developed as next-generation colocation data center providing ultra-reliable uptime, reduced latency, and robust connectivity for enterprises operating locally and worldwide. Dr. Muthu Chezhian, CEO of Aslan Energy Capital, stated, "This partnership reflects our shared vision to power the digital future with clean, reliable, and scalable infrastructure that respects environmental limits while enabling economic transformation." In alignment with Jakarta's urban planning and environmental needs, the facility is designed as a two-story vertical structure utilizing modular and prefabricated components for rapid deployment and minimal construction impact. With 40% of the land dedicated to built infrastructure and 60% preserved as a natural corridor featuring century-old trees, AJDC is designed to be green -both in function and in form. In addition, the data center will utilize hybrid air-cooled heat exchangers, a significant innovation that removes reliance on cooling towers and sharply reduces daily water use. Satrio Witjaksono, President Director of JIEP, commented, "We are proud to collaborate with Aslan Energy Capital to introduce a new model for sustainable data infrastructure within Indonesia's most strategic industrial estate. This project will contribute to national digital transformation goals while setting new environmental standards." This alliance underlines both entities' commitment to Indonesia's renewable energy transition and smart industrial development, in line with the national roadmap for sustainability, digitalization, and green economy leadership. View original content: SOURCE Aslan Energy Capital Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
