@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20250120

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

- CHIPS Act in Trump Administration - Quantum Computing stocks - Intel's mystery acquirer - HPE's $1B win [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/HPCNB_20250120.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20250120 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 of Inside HPC, and with me, of course, is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. With a new administration coming into office today, there's news that President Trump, who is president as of noon Eastern time, may be softening the negative stance he took toward the CHIPS Act during last year's presidential campaign. According to a Bloomberg story,

Trump's Commerce Secretary appointee, Howard Lutnnick and the Trump administration do not plan to reverse the legislation. This, at least, is the impression Lutnick gave to outgoing Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, according to Bloomberg. Trump had called the legislation deeply flawed, yet it would seem that one of the overriding goals of the CHIPS Act, which is to reestablish a domestic manufacturing supply chain for semiconductors in the U.S., would be aligned with the new administration's America First outlook. Yeah, the CHIPS and Science Act, as it's called, was signed into law in 2022 and has been a major industrial policy in a very critical area. It authorized some $280 billion in new funding to accelerate research and manufacturing in the United States, and it appropriated $52.7 billion of it to start.

It has shown results given all the investments in the U.S. for chip manufacturing technologies, including factories in operation by TSMC in Arizona. Whether it would continue was a big question. News articles said, as you mentioned, that the nominee for the position of Commerce Secretary has indicated that they intend to continue the implementation of the CHIPS Act. As we covered a couple of months ago, it would not be surprising if it gets modified and relaunched, but it is reassuring that it will continue. The CHIPS Act, of course, has to a degree centered around Intel, the largest remaining American chip manufacturer at the very high end

that former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger worked very hard to position as a recipient of CHIPS Act grants. But now the tech news site SemiAccurate released the story last Thursday that a major company is considering buying Intel outright, both the chip design and the chip fab parts. Interestingly, the publication said it first got onto the story two months ago before Gelsinger left the company. In any case, Intel stock jumped at the report, which came as a pleasant surprise for Intel shareholders who have seen the stock decline for some time and then accelerate further after Gelsinger's departure. As for who the mystery buyer of Intel might be, rumors are circulating around Elon Musk, who has become a close advisor and confidant of

President Trump. Reports state that Musk could be aligned with semiconductor firm Global Foundries and chipmaker Qualcomm, and that all three parties have been at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate discussing the matter. We'll be watching for developments. Quantum computing, of course, is an emerging field with great potential, attracting lots of investment and enabling some quantum startups to go public with recent growth in stock prices. But that stock momentum received a hard break when two of the tech celebrities of our time, Jensen Wong and Mark Zuckerberg, both cautioned that quantum is not close to being ready for prime time. Zuckerberg said, quote, I'm not really an expert on quantum computing, but my understanding is that it's

still quite a ways off from being a truly practical paradigm. While Jensen suggested it might be 15 to 30 years away, the market did not react kindly with stocks dropping by large percentage points. We're talking 30 to 50 percent, though they have recovered to some degree since. Investing in advanced technologies in a brand new market is really the domain of governments and venture capital firms and their so-called accredited investors who presumably can absorb the downside of risks. Whether it's quantum computing, AI, crypto, biotech, IoT, robotics, or a number of other new tech, the responsibility to understand and accept the risks falls with the individual investor when

it's a public investment situation. Quantum computing, you could say, is in a superposition state of research and development. There is a lot of very good and substantial progress that we should celebrate and also quite a bit of hype that we should ignore. As for readiness or usefulness, we should ask, useful for who? Quantum computing is about a billion-dollar market according to various estimates. So that much of it is here today and is real. It includes those who want to participate in making advances, to learn, to be prepared, to test kernels, to build modules, and to integrate into HPC, among other things. Depending on how you define it, everything can be said to be some years out. Anything with a roadmap has progress to make,

and there will be more breakthroughs which can come from any direction. So it is a market that is evolving and has not yet settled on a winning approach. We mentioned Musk. He showed up in another tech story last week. Bloomberg reported that HPE has won a billion-dollar deal with Musk's TwitterX for AI-optimized servers. In addition, HLRS, the supercomputing center at the University of Stuttgart, announced that a 15 million euros, 47 petaflops supercomputer called Hunter, based on the HPE Cray EX4000 architecture, powered by AMD chips, is now operational. All right, folks, that's it. Thanks for joining us. HPC Newsbytes is a production of OrionX in association with Inside HPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on InsideHPC.com and

posted on OrionX.net. Thank you for listening.