@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20240311

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

- IndiaAI Mission, including a 10,000-GPU supercomputer - Countries court chip manufacturers for local fabs - AI value-chain consolidation from fabs to apps to clouds - Atos spinout of Eviden caught in financial complexity [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/HPCNB_20240311.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20240311 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bites, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black. Hi, Shaheen. We start this episode where we left off last week when we discussed Singapore's big AI training and skills program. Now, India

is moving aggressively in AI. The country announced last week a massive AI development effort called India AI Mission. It comes on the heels of their recent announcement that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will invest $15 billion into construction of three advanced semiconductor fabs, construction that will begin within 100 days. Last week's announcement also included $1.27 billion budgeted for India's AI ecosystem over the next five years. There are plans for a 10,000 GPU AI supercomputer to support academic research and the development of large multimodal AI models. There's the notion of an India AI data sets platform, which provides access to public sector

data. And there's an India AI future skills program to expand graduate and postgraduate AI programs. Also notable is India AI seems like a significant brand that consolidates a lot of investments and activities. Now, for countries, part of the strategy for self-sufficiency in tech is having local manufacturing capacity for chips. TSMC and Intel are especially visible as various countries court them and sweeten their offers with subsidies, tax breaks, and trained workforce. We got a glimpse of that in TSMC's financials release this week, where according to reports, TSMC received $1.5

billion in subsidies in 2023, just from Japan and China, and going forward, expected to receive subsidies from Japan, US, and Germany. The reports also mentioned that Apple is the largest TSMC's customer, accounting for some 25% of TSMC's revenue, followed by NVIDIA at 11%. Other reports have included AMD and Qualcomm as large customers as well. Chip companies fight on multiple fronts, and allocating capacity across these fronts is shaping what we see downstream in product availability. In addition to capacity, chip companies must also keep in mind the whole value chain from fabs to apps. So we are seeing actions up and down the chain, mostly focused on AI, since that's the big driver in spending on technology these days. An example of that was news last week that Grok, whose AI chips had a very good showing

at SC23 with new benchmarks on large language models, has acquired an AI app company called Definitive Intelligence. Yeah, another example is NVIDIA's efforts, not just with large cloud providers, but also with smaller tier two clouds. We should expect to see more value chain consolidation as AI chips continue to be in short supply, and as they become less differentiated. If any one of several AI chips would do, then it might as well be your chip. And you can influence that decision by providing capacity preferentially in exchange for commitment to use your chip or outright

acquire the company. Doug ran a story on Wednesday reviewing the spin-out of Evident by Atos. So to rewind the tape, back in 2014, Atos, an IT services company in France, acquired Bull, the well-respected French computer company. Fast forward to October 2021, about seven years later, Atos said they wanted to split it back out again under the name Eviden. They had acquired a cybersecurity company called Evidian, which presumably was the preferred name, but news articles said Evidian sounded too much like NVIDIA, so they decided on Eviden as the name. Of course, by then, HPC and AI were becoming imperatives for all big economies. And Eviden is right up there in their high-end supercomputing, AI, edge, and quantum software

technologies. So you'd think this level of financial engineering with only, in quotes, a few billion dollars at stake would be a breeze, but it's not. Nevertheless, the technology is too important, and I would be highly surprised if it is not sorted out soon. Yes, the financial problems at Atos began to surface last year. There have been numerous reports that Atos has taken on major debt, and also the acquisition of its tech foundations unit by a Czech investor has collapsed. As for Evident, there already are few competitors in the leadership

supercomputing arena for which Eviden is the European leader. While it's unclear how much of Atos' debt problems are impacting Eviden, it's undoubtedly clear that Eviden has won major deals over the past year, including a $100 million contract in India, along with the contract to build Europe's first exascale supercomputer for EuroHPC at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany. There were reports last year that a possible purchase by Airbus of Eviden's cybersecurity division, but that deal has fallen through as well, and there is speculation that the French government or the EU may step in to support Eviden. The stakes, of course, are high as Europe continues to push for supercomputing self-sufficiency.

All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC Newsbytes is a production of OrionX in association with InsideHPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on Inside HPC.com and posted on Orion X.net. Thank you for listening.