@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20250210

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

- Big AI land grab - Nuclear power for data centers - New European-origin quantum system in Spain - Softbank eyes Ampere [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/HPCNB_20250210.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20250210 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bytes, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bytes. I'm Doug Black of InsideHPC, and with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. And Shaheen, it's been a long time since we started calling the big hyperscalers, which used to be referenced as the fang and other monikers, that they are markets under themselves. That is, their tech buying power is so enormous that they move vendors and entire tech

sectors in accordance with their tech needs and strategies. It's the same now, of course, only more so. Matt Eastwood, a senior VP at industry analyst firm IDC, put together a bar chart showing extraordinary IT spending by Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta. A grouping, if we want to give it a name, could be called Big AI. In 2014, the four companies spent roughly $20 billion on CapEx, which is paltry by today's standards. Incidentally, only in the period from 2014 to 2025 has CapEx spending among these companies decreased, and that was in 2023, which saw a slight decline. Note also that the last two years have seen aggressive CapEx increases, more so than in

the preceding 10 years. Fang included Netflix, which has gradually morphed into an end user, and the list doesn't include some other global big players, so big AI is a good way to reference this and make room for others. The spending by just those four companies adds up to more than $310 billion with a B. That's more than 2x what it was in 2023. So the big shift started in 2024 and it was spent on AI data centers, custom chips, model training and other AI infrastructure. The numbers are so big and

have grown so fast that you have to wonder how the land grab by big AI changes the whole tech landscape. Notably, it is historically important when private money is bigger than public money in any field. It's even more important when it is bigger by orders of magnitude. That is a significant thread that has been running through high tech. We've touched on it in the past and we will continue to pursue. Sticking with hyperscalers, all this infrastructure is going to need a lot of electricity. And where they're going is nuclear power in the form of reviving old nuclear reactors like Microsoft did and SMRs, small modular reactors like Google is doing as we mentioned

last week. Yes, we covered last week Google's long-term partnership with K-ROS Power to build a fleet of SMRs. And in September, we talked about Microsoft reopening one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. News this week was that Rockville, Maryland-based X-Energy Reactor Company is closing a $700 million Series C financing round, complementing a previously announced round anchored by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. If state and local regulators, along with the public, can be convinced that nuclear power

can be done safely, and that's a big if, then nuclear is likely the most effective way to deliver clean energy to data centers at scale whose power demands are on course to outstrip available conventional and sustainable energy sources. In spite of recent pessimistic comments from Jensen Wong and Mark Zuckerberg about quantum computing, money and R&D efforts focused on the technology continue apace. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has presented what it said is the first quantum computer developed with 100% European technology. The digital quantum system is integrated into the Myra Nelstrom 5 supercomputer at BSC and will

be joined by one of the first European analog quantum computers, awarded to BSC by the Euro HPC Joint Undertaking. The center said, this lays the foundation for what has become conventional wisdom regarding the place of quantum once it's commercially operational, to stand along classical HPC in a hybrid role handling workloads for which it is best suited. The system is part of the Quantum Spain project, a collaborative effort involving 27 research and supercomputing institutions.

We see a lot of quantum activity happening in Europe. Evidence is notably involved. And wouldn't it be something if Europe, which traditionally lags behind the US and China on supercomputing related technologies, were to steal a march on the rest of the world in quantum computing? Definitely worth watching. Let's end with another big money move by Japan's SoftBank, which kind of invented the idea of overwhelmingly large

investments. And we saw some of that with the Stargate announcement together with Oracle and OpenAI to the tune of $500 billion. This time, the news is about Ampere Computing, who's managed to get traction in the crowded ARM-based CPU market, including in the Oracle cloud infrastructure. Apparently, negotiations are in advanced stages for SoftBank to acquire Ampere in a deal valued at about $6.5 billion. SoftBank continues to own something like 90% of Arm Holdings and acquired Graphcore, an AI startup, last year for about $500 million. We'll see how the US government reacts to this since

it took steps on January 30th to block the acquisition of Juniper Networks by HPE. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC News Bytes 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.