Ahead of Mobile World Congress 2025, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced an expanded collaboration to drive enterprise-grade generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across edge and cloud devices designed to enable increased immediacy, privacy, reliability, personalization, and reduced cost and energy consumption. Through this collaboration, the companies plan to integrate watsonx.governance for generative AI solutions powered by Qualcomm Technologies' platforms, and enable support for IBM's Granite models through the Qualcomm AI Inference Suite and Qualcomm AI Hub.

"At Qualcomm Technologies, we are excited to join forces with IBM to deliver cutting-edge, enterprise-grade generative AI solutions for devices across the edge and cloud," said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager, technology planning and edge solutions, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "This collaboration enables businesses to deploy AI solutions that are not only fast and personalized but also come with robust governance, monitoring, and decision-making capabilities, with the ability to enhance the overall reliability of AI from edge to cloud."

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has completed its acquisition of HashiCorp, whose products automate and secure the infrastructure that underpins hybrid cloud applications and generative AI. Together the companies' capabilities will help clients accelerate innovation, strengthen security, and get more value from the cloud.

Today nearly 75% of enterprises are using hybrid cloud, including public clouds from hyperscalers and on-prem data centers, which can enable true innovation with a consistent approach to delivering and managing that infrastructure at scale. Enterprises are looking for ways to more efficiently manage and modernize cloud infrastructure and security tasks from initial planning and design, to ongoing maintenance. By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications. Supporting this scale requires infrastructure automation far beyond the capacity of the workforce alone.

Intel today showcased how Intel Xeon 6 processors with Efficient-cores (E-cores) have dramatically accelerated time-to-market adoption for the company's solutions in collaboration with the ecosystem. Since product introduction in June 2024, 5G core solution partners have independently validated a 3.2x performance improvement, a 3.8x performance per watt increase and, in collaboration with the Intel Infrastructure Power Manager launched at MWC 2024, a 60% reduction in run-time power consumption.

"As 5G core networks continue to build out using Intel Xeon processors, which are deployed in the vast majority of 5G networks worldwide, infrastructure efficiency, power savings and uncompromised performance are essential criteria for communication service providers (CoSPs). Intel is pleased to announce that our 5G core solution partners have accelerated the adoption of Intel Xeon 6 with E-cores and are immediately passing along these benefits to their customers. In addition, with Intel Infrastructure Power Manager, our partners have a run-time software solution that is showing tremendous progress in reducing server power in CoSP environments on existing and new infrastructure." -Alex Quach, Intel vice president and general manager of Wireline and Core Network Division

LG Electronics (LG) is bringing its Gaming Portal to a wide range of screens and platforms in 2025. Currently available on LG Smart TVs running webOS 23 and above in 19 markets, the service will extend to additional markets, platforms and devices - including LG Smart Monitors and StanbyME lifestyle screens - by the second quarter of the year. This expansion aims to enhance the overall game streaming experience by providing seamless access to popular and new titles.

The Gaming Portal serves as a central hub for gameplay options, offering an effortless way to discover new titles and enjoy the ones gamers already love. Through partnerships with leading cloud gaming services like NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna, Boosteroid, Blacknut and soon Xbox Cloud, along with many native webOS app games, LG delivers a wide variety of games across different genres.

STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, is unveiling its next generation of proprietary technologies for higher-performing optical interconnect in datacenters and AI clusters. With the exponential growth of AI computing needs, challenges arise in performance and energy efficiency across computing, memory, power supply, and the interconnections linking them. ST is helping hyperscalers, and the leading optical module provider, overcome those challenges with new silicon photonics and next-gen BiCMOS technologies, scheduled to ramp up from the second half of 2025 for 800 Gb/s and 1.6 Tb/s optical modules.

At the heart of interconnections in a datacenter are thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of optical transceivers. These devices convert optical into electrical signals and vice versa to allow data flow between graphics processing unit (GPU) computing resources, switches and storage. Inside these transceivers, ST's new, proprietary silicon photonics (SiPho) technology will bring customers the ability to integrate multiple complex components into one single chip, while ST's next-gen, proprietary BiCMOS technology brings ultra high-speed and low power optical connectivity, which are key to sustain the AI growth.

Lenovo Group Limited (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY), together with its subsidiaries ('the Group'), today announced Q3 results for fiscal year 2024/25, reporting significant increases in overall group revenue and profit. Revenue grew 20% year-on-year to US$18.8 billion, marking the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Net income more than doubled year-on-year to US$693 million (including a non-recurring income tax credit of US$282 million) on a Hong Kong Financial Reporting Standards (HKFRS) basis. The Group's diversified growth engines continue to accelerate, with non-PC revenue mix up more than four points year-on-year to 46%. The quarter's results were driven by the Group's focused hybrid-AI strategy, the turnaround of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, as well as double-digit growth for both the Intelligent Devices Group and Solutions and Services Group.

Lenovo continues to invest in R&D, with R&D expenses up nearly 14% year-on-year to US$621 million. At the recent global technology event CES 2025, Lenovo launched a series of innovative products, including the world's first rollable AI laptop, the world's first handheld gaming device that allows gamers free choice of Windows OS or Steam OS, as well as Moto AI - winning 185 industry awards for its portfolio of innovation.

AI reasoning models and agents are set to transform industries, but delivering their full potential at scale requires massive compute and optimized software. The "reasoning" process involves multiple models, generating many additional tokens, and demands infrastructure with a combination of high-speed communication, memory and compute to ensure real-time, high-quality results. To meet this demand, CoreWeave has launched NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-based instances, becoming the first cloud service provider to make the NVIDIA Blackwell platform generally available. With rack-scale NVIDIA NVLink across 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs, scaling to up to 110,000 GPUs with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, these instances provide the scale and performance needed to build and deploy the next generation of AI reasoning models and agents.

NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 on CoreWeave
NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 is a liquid-cooled, rack-scale solution with a 72-GPU NVLink domain, which enables the six dozen GPUs to act as a single massive GPU. NVIDIA Blackwell features many technological breakthroughs that accelerate inference token generation, boosting performance while reducing service costs. For example, fifth-generation NVLink enables 130 TB/s of GPU bandwidth in one 72-GPU NVLink domain, and the second-generation Transformer Engine enables FP4 for faster AI performance while maintaining high accuracy. CoreWeave's portfolio of managed cloud services is purpose-built for Blackwell. CoreWeave Kubernetes Service optimizes workload orchestration by exposing NVLink domain IDs, ensuring efficient scheduling within the same rack. Slurm on Kubernetes (SUNK) supports the topology block plug-in, enabling intelligent workload distribution across GB200 NVL72 racks. In addition, CoreWeave's Observability Platform provides real-time insights into NVLink performance, GPU utilization and temperatures.

When High-Flyer, the hedge fund behind DeepSeek, debuted its flagship model, DeepSeek R1, the tech world went downward. No one expected Chinese AI companies can produce high-quality AI model that rivals the best from OpenAI and Anthropic. While there are rumors that DeepSeek has access to 50,000 NVIDIA "Hopper" GPUs, including H100, H800, and H20, it seems like Huawei is ready to power Chinese AI infrastructure with its AI accelerators. According to the South China Morning Post, Chinese cloud providers like SiliconFlow.cn are offering DeepSeek AI models for inference on Huawei Ascend 910B accelerators. For the price of only one Yuan for one million input tokens, and four Yuan for one million output tokens, this economic model of AI hosting is fundamentally undercutting competition like US-based cloud providers that offer DeepSeek R1 for $7 per million tokens.

Not only is running on the Huawei Ascend 910B cheaper for cloud providers, but we also reported that it is cheaper for DeepSeek itself, which serves its chat app on the Huawei Ascend 910C. Using domestic accelerators lowers the total cost of ownership, with savings passed down to users. If Western clients prefer AI inference to be served by Western companies, they will have to pay a heftier price tag, often backed by the high prices of GPUs like NVIDIA H100, B100, and AMD Instinct MI300X.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended December 31, 2024, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $69.6 billion and increased 12%
• Operating income was $31.7 billion and increased 17% (up 16% in constant currency)
• Net income was $24.1 billion and increased 10%
• Diluted earnings per share was $3.23 and increased 10%

"We are innovating across our tech stack and helping customers unlock the full ROI of AI to capture the massive opportunity ahead," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "Already, our AI business has surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $13 billion, up 175% year-over-year."

Supermicro, Inc. (SMCI), a Total IT Solution Provider for AI/ML, HPC, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is showcasing the latest solutions for the retail industry in collaboration with NVIDIA at the National Retail Federation (NRF) annual show. As generative AI (GenAI) grows in capability and becomes more easily accessible, retailers are leveraging NVIDIA NIM microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, for a broad spectrum of applications.

"Supermicro's innovative server, storage, and edge computing solutions improve retail operations, store security, and operational efficiency," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "At NRF, Supermicro is excited to introduce retailers to AI's transformative potential and to revolutionize the customer's experience. Our systems here will help resolve day-to-day concerns and elevate the overall buying experience."

Qualcomm is becoming serious about its server CPU ambitions. Today, we have learned that Sailesh Kottapalli, Intel's former chief architect for Xeon server processors, has joined Qualcomm as Senior Vice President after 28 years at Intel. Kottapalli, who announced his departure on LinkedIn Monday, previously led the development of multiple Xeon and Itanium processors at Intel. Qualcomm's data center team is currently working on reference platforms based on their Snapdragon technology. The company already sells AI accelerator chips under the Qualcomm Cloud AI brand, supported by major providers including AWS, HPE, and Lenovo.

This marks Qualcomm's second attempt at entering the server CPU market, following an unsuccessful Centriq effort that ended in 2018. The company is now leveraging technology from its $1.4 billion Nuvia acquisition in 2021, though this has led to ongoing legal disputes with Arm over licensing terms. While Qualcomm hasn't officially detailed Kottapalli's role, the company confirmed in legal filings its intentions to continue developing data center CPUs, as originally planned by Nuvia.

LG Electronics (LG) has announced a partnership with Xbox, providing players access to hundreds of games with the Xbox app on LG Smart TVs. Owners of LG's latest Smart TVs will be able to effortlessly discover and play a wide selection of PC and console games from industry-leading partners, and soon Xbox, through the new Gaming Portal. This versatile, gaming centric hub is designed as an all-in-one solution for seamless navigation and personalized gaming, both for the latest AAA games and casual webOS app games.

For gaming enthusiasts, LG Smart TV users can soon explore the Gaming Portal for direct access to hundreds of games with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, including popular titles like Call of Duty: BlackOps 6, and highly anticipated releases like Avowed. With Game Pass Ultimate, players will also be able to stream a catalog of select Xbox games they own such as NBA 2K25 or Hogwarts Legacy.

GeForce NOW is wrapping a sleigh-full of gaming gifts this month, stuffing members' cloud gaming stockings with new titles and fresh offers to keep holiday gaming spirits merry and bright. Adventure calls and whip-cracking action awaits in the highly anticipated Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, streaming in the cloud today during the Advanced Access period for those who have preordered the Premium Edition from Steam or the Microsoft Store. The title can only be played with RTX ON - GeForce NOW is offering gamers without high-performance hardware the ability to play it with 25% off Ultimate and Performance Day Passes. It's like finding that extra-special gift hidden behind the tree.

This GFN Thursday also brings a new limited-time offer: 50% off the first month of new Ultimate or Performance memberships - a gift that can keep on giving. Whether looking to try out GeForce NOW or buckle in for long-term cloud gaming, new members can choose between the Day Pass sale or the new membership offer. There's a perfect gaming gift for everyone this holiday season. GFN Thursday also brings 13 new titles in December, with four available this week to get the festivities going. Plus, the latest update to GeForce NOW - version 2.0.69 - includes expanded support for 10-bit color precision. This feature enhances image quality when streaming on Windows, macOS and NVIDIA SHIELD TVs - and now to Edge and Chrome browsers on Windows devices, as well as to the Chrome browser on Chromebooks, Samsung TVs and LG TVs.

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, today announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, introduced new Trn2 UltraServers, enabling customers to train and deploy today's latest AI models as well as future large language models (LLM) and foundation models (FM) with exceptional levels of performance and cost efficiency, and unveiled next-generation Trainium3 chips.

"Trainium2 is purpose built to support the largest, most cutting-edge generative AI workloads, for both training and inference, and to deliver the best price performance on AWS," said David Brown, vice president of Compute and Networking at AWS. "With models approaching trillions of parameters, we understand customers also need a novel approach to train and run these massive workloads. New Trn2 UltraServers offer the fastest training and inference performance on AWS and help organizations of all sizes to train and deploy the world's largest models faster and at a lower cost."

Today, Lenovo announced the introduction of ThinkShield Firmware Assurance as part of its portfolio of enterprise-grade cybersecurity solutions. ThinkShield Firmware Assurance is one of the only computer OEM solutions to enable deep visibility and protection below the operating system (OS) by embracing Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) component-level visibility to generate more accurate and actionable risk management insights.

As a security paradigm, ZTA explicitly identifies users and devices to grant appropriate levels of access so a business can operate with less risk and minimal friction. ZTA is a critical framework to reduce risk as organizations endeavor to complete Zero-Trust implementations.

Today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announces its new high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure portfolio that includes leadership-class HPE Cray Supercomputing EX solutions and two systems optimized for large language model (LLM) training, natural language processing (NLP) and multi-modal model training. The new supercomputing solutions are designed to help global customers fast-track scientific research and invention.

"Service providers and nations investing in sovereign AI initiatives are increasingly turning to high-performance computing as the critical backbone enabling large-scale AI training that accelerates discovery and innovation," said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE. "Our customers turn to us to fast-track their AI system deployment to realize value faster and more efficiently by leveraging our world-leading HPC solutions and decades of experience in delivering, deploying and servicing fully-integrated systems."

In an era where data has become a core asset for modern enterprises, TerraMaster, a global leader in data storage and management solutions, has announced the official launch of five high-performance integrated backup servers: T9-500 Pro, T12-500 Pro, U4-500, U8-500 Plus, and U12-500 Plus. This product release not only enriches TerraMaster enterprise-level product line but also provides enterprise users with an integrated, efficient, and secure data backup solution - from hardware to software - by pairing these devices with the company proprietary BBS Business Backup Suite.

Key Features of the New Integrated Backup Servers

• T9-500 Pro & T12-500 Pro: As new members of TerraMaster high-end series, these products feature compact designs and are easy to manage. With powerful processors, large memory capacities, and dual 10GbE network interfaces, they ensure high-efficiency data backup tasks, catering to the large-scale data storage and backup needs of small and medium-sized enterprises.
• U4-500: Designed for SOHO, small offices, and remote work scenarios, the U4-500 features a compact 4-bay design and convenient network connectivity, making it an ideal data backup solution. Its user-friendly management interface allows for easy deployment and maintenance.
• U8-500 Plus & U12-500 Plus: These two rackmount 8-bay and 12-bay upgraded models feature fully optimized designs, high-performance processors, and standard dual 10GbE high-speed interfaces. They not only improve data processing speeds but also enhance data security, making them particularly suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises that need to handle large volumes of data backup and recovery.

Microsoft has taken another significant step in its AI integration strategy by introducing "Terminal Chat," an AI assistant now available in Windows Terminal. This latest feature brings conversational AI capabilities directly to the command-line interface, marking a notable advancement in making terminal operations more accessible to users of all skill levels. The new feature, currently available in Windows Terminal (Canary), leverages various AI services, including ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Azure OpenAI, to provide interactive assistance for command-line operations. What sets Terminal Chat apart is its context-aware functionality, which automatically recognizes the specific shell environment being used—whether it's PowerShell, Command Prompt, WSL Ubuntu, or Azure Cloud Shell—and tailors its responses accordingly.

Users can interact with Terminal Chat through a dedicated interface within Windows Terminal, where they can ask questions, troubleshoot errors, and request guidance on specific commands. The system provides shell-specific suggestions, automatically adjusting its recommendations based on whether a user is working in Windows PowerShell, Linux, or other environments. For example, when asked about creating a directory, Terminal Chat will suggest "New-Item -ItemType Directory" for PowerShell users while providing "mkdir" as the appropriate command for Linux environments. This intelligent adaptation helps bridge the knowledge gap between different command-line interfaces. Below are some examples courtesy of Windows Latest and their testing:

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended September 30, 2024, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $65.6 billion and increased 16%
• Operating income was $30.6 billion and increased 14%
• Net income was $24.7 billion and increased 11% (up 10% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $3.30 and increased 10%

"AI-driven transformation is changing work, work artifacts, and workflow across every role, function, and business process," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "We are expanding our opportunity and winning new customers as we help them apply our AI platforms and tools to drive new growth and operating leverage."

Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink ) Consortium, led by Board Members from AMD, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Astera Labs, Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Meta and Microsoft, have announced the incorporation of the Consortium and are extending an invitation for membership to the community. The UALink Promoter Group was founded in May 2024 to define a high-speed, low-latency interconnect for scale-up communications between accelerators and switches in AI pods & clusters. "The UALink standard defines high-speed and low latency communication for scale-up AI systems in data centers"

Last week, we got a preview of Microsoft's Azure production-ready NVIDIA "Blackwell" GB200 system, showing that only a third of the rack that goes in the data center is actually holding the compute elements, with the other two-thirds holding the cooling compartment to cool down the immense heat output from tens of GB200 GPUs. Today, Google is showing off a part of its own infrastructure ahead of the Google Cloud App Dev & Infrastructure Summit, taking place on October 30, digitally as an event. Shown below are two racks standing side by side, connecting NVIDIA "Blackwell" GB200 NVL cards with the rest of the Google infrastructure. Unlike Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud uses a different data center design in its facilities.

There is one rack with power distribution units, networking switches, and cooling distribution units, all connected to the compute rack, which houses power supplies, GPUs, and CPU servers. Networking equipment is present, and it connects to Google's "global" data center network, which is Google's own data center fabric. We are not sure what is the fabric connection of choice between these racks; as for optimal performance, NVIDIA recommends InfiniBand (Mellanox acquisition). However, given that Google's infrastructure is set up differently, there may be Ethernet switches present. Interestingly, Google's design of GB200 racks differs from Azure's, as it uses additional rack space to distribute the coolant to its local heat exchangers, i.e., coolers. We are curious to see if Google releases more information on infrastructure, as it has been known as the infrastructure king because of its ability to scale and keep everything organized.

Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is launching a new optimized storage system for high performance AI training, inference and HPC workloads. This JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) system utilizes up to four NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing units (DPUs) in a 2U form factor to run software-defined storage workloads. Each BlueField-3 DPU features 400 Gb Ethernet or InfiniBand networking and hardware acceleration for high computation storage and networking workloads such as encryption, compression and erasure coding, as well as AI storage expansion. The state-of-the-art, dual port JBOF architecture enables active-active clustering ensuring high availability for scale up mission critical storage applications as well as scale-out storage such as object storage and parallel file systems.

"Supermicro's new high performance JBOF Storage System is designed using our Building Block approach which enables support for either E3.S or U.2 form-factor SSDs and the latest PCIe Gen 5 connectivity for the SSDs and the DPU networking and storage platform," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Supermicro's system design supports 24 or 36 SSD's enabling up to 1.105PB of raw capacity using 30.71 TB SSDs. Our balanced network and storage I/O design can saturate the full 400 Gb/s BlueField-3 line-rate realizing more than 250 GB/s bandwidth of the Gen 5 SSDs."

Jabil Inc. announced today that it is expanding its server portfolio with the J421E-S and J422-S servers, powered by AMD 5th Generation EPYC and Intel Xeon 6 processors. These servers are purpose-built for scalability in a variety of cloud data center applications, including AI, high-performance computing (HPC), fintech, networking, storage, databases, and security — representing the latest generation of server innovation from Jabil.

Built with customization and innovation in mind, the design-ready J422-S and J421E-S servers will allow engineering teams to meet customers' specific requirements. By fine-tuning Jabil's custom BIOS and BMC firmware, Jabil can create a competitive advantage for customers by developing the server configuration needed for higher performance, data management, and security. The server platforms are now available for sampling and will be in production by the first half of 2025.

Astera Labs, Inc, a global leader in semiconductor-based connectivity solutions for AI and cloud infrastructure, today announced a new portfolio of fabric switches, including the industry's first PCIe 6 switch, built from the ground up for demanding AI workloads in accelerated computing platforms deployed at cloud-scale. The Scorpio Smart Fabric Switch portfolio is optimized for AI dataflows to deliver maximum predictable performance per watt, high reliability, easy cloud-scale deployment, reduced time-to-market, and lower total cost of ownership.

The Scorpio Smart Fabric Switch portfolio features two application-specific product lines with a multi-generational roadmap:

• Scorpio P-Series for GPU-to-CPU/NIC/SSD PCIe 6 connectivity- architected to support mixed traffic head-node connectivity across a diverse ecosystem of PCIe hosts and endpoints.
• Scorpio X-Series for back-end GPU clustering-architected to deliver the highest back-end GPU-to-GPU bandwidth with platform-specific customization.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, announces the launch of a new, versatile, high-density infrastructure platform optimized for AI inferencing at the network edge. As companies seek to embrace complex large language models (LLM) in their daily operations, there is a need for new hardware capable of inferencing high volumes of data in edge locations with minimal latency. Supermicro's innovative system combines versatility, performance, and thermal efficiency to deliver up to 10 double-width GPUs in a single system capable of running in traditional air-cooled environments.

"Owing to the system's optimized thermal design, Supermicro can deliver all this performance in a high-density 3U 20 PCIe system with 256 cores that can be deployed in edge data centers," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "As the AI market is growing exponentially, customers need a powerful, versatile solution to inference data to run LLM-based applications on-premises, close to where the data is generated. Our new 3U Edge AI system enables them to run innovative solutions with minimal latency."