@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20250922

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

- Nvidia, Intel, and $5B - Is APU the way to go? - Nvidia, Enfabrica, and $0.9B - Interconnects and Networking key to AI Data Center - PsiQuantum and $1 Billion - Investment continues to grow for Quantum Tech [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/HPCNB_20250922.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20250922 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC Newsbytes, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HBC Newsbytes. I'm Doug Black, Vincied HBC, and with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. Another week, another major news bombshell from NVIDIA. This time, the news points to a major realignment in the chip industry, NVIDIA, invested. $5 billion in Intel, as the two companies agreed to a broad technology partnership to co-develop AI-enabled chips for PCs and data centers. They positioned it as the combination of their core strengths, Nvidia in GPUs and AI compute, and Intel and CPUs, and therefore data center

and PCs. This comes on the heels of the U.S. government taking an $8.9 billion equity position and Intel funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in Chips Act grants awarded to Intel but not yet paid and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave Program. One immediate result of these moves has been to reinvigorate investor interest in Intel. Its stock shot up more than 30% after the announcement and ended the week up 20%. We, of course, wonder how the news has been received by AMD, which had been the only only major chip player with an X-86 CPU-GPU integration under one roof. Now they're contending with the NVIDIA GPU market monster in combination with the former

CPU market monster. AMD successfully took on Intel. We'll see how things go taking on this new tandem. NVIDIA is as good as it gets in terms of a vote of confidence for Intel. The announcement was mainly focused on the X-86 chip side of Intel, but it briefly mentioned providing NVIDO with Foundry services. So this should have a beneficial impact for the emerging high-end fabs that Intel has been building.

NVIDIAs said their co-development with Intel will be separate from and in parallel with what NVIDIA is doing with its ARM CPUs, such as on the desktop with their DGX Spark and in the data center with Grace and the future Vera CPUs. The companies also mentioned NVLink and the opportunity to build a much tighter connection between CPUs and GPUs. The idea of integrated graphics on a CPU goes back many years.

About a decade ago, AMD called it an accelerated processing unit or APU, and that has become an industry term. InVideo took that concept into the data center with Grace Hopper and AMD followed a year later with their MI300A. So we could anticipate Intel and Invidia having an APU that combines X86 CPU and Nvidia GPUs connected with NVLink or some other coherent connection, and then collectively participating in an NVLink fabric for scale-up processing. That will be a very interesting offering.

Okay, while corporations are spending big on AI, tech companies are spending enormous sums on AI talent. CNBC reported last week that Nvidia paid more than $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO, Rohan Sanker, and other of his employees, and to license the company's technology. The deal reminds us of AI talent hires by META and Google, in which some accepted $100 million contract offers. The NVIDIA and Fabrica deal closed early last week, and Sankar and his team, have joined NVIDIA. Sheen, it also sounds similar to the way corporate suitors pursued data scientists six or seven years ago, only more so. Yes, definitely a whole new era with AI.

Enfabrico was touted as a hot interconnect company since the beginning. They presented at hot chips last year, and their technology is reportedly being tested at customer sites. The deal with NVIDIA is an interesting financial structure. It really comes across as an acquie hire, except with technology being licensed, apparently. The infabrica chip basically acts as a clearinghouse for traffic between PCIE and Ethernet. This allows it to sit between scale up CPUs and GPUs, which connect to it via PCIE, and scale out networking and remote resources via Ethernet. Add to that support for CXL and MPI, and you can see an elastic and scalable system.

So this is another capability in NVIDIA's arsenal as it drives system architecture on many fronts, and another indication of the importance of interconnects and networking in the AI data center. Two weeks ago, we talked about monies being raised by the quantum technology industry, and that flow continues. In fact, it's exploding. Now it's been reported that CyQuantum, which is pursuing high-scale single-chip photonics QPUs, has raised $1 billion in what will be their E-round, including participation by NVIDIA's increasingly active venture arm. CyQuantum has raised a total of $2.32 billion to date. Zanadu in Canada and Orca in the UK also are pursuing the photonics approach to quantum computing.

In 2024, the quantum industry as a whole raised some $2 billion, which was 50% more than 2023. This year, it totaled $1.25 billion just in the first quarter, another roughly $1.2 billion in Q2, and Q3 looks like more than $2.1 billion so far. So that's another good week for quantum tech. There are many other well-funded quantum players. Cuera, with its neutral atom approach, raised $230 million in February, which included participation by Google Quantum AI and SoftB.

And IQM International Quantum Machines raised $320 million this month, just in their Series B, for their superconducting QPUs and error-correcting technology. not to mention D-Wave, Quentinium, IonQ, Rigetti, and several others, nor the big guys who don't need to raise money like IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so the industry can look forward to a competitive environment and good breakthroughs, as big money continues to chase enormous potential. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC Newsbytes is a production of Orion X in association with Inside HPC.

Black host the show. Every episode is featured on insidehpc.com and posted on Orionx.net. Thank you for listening.