Yesterday, at Intel Vision 2025, IBM announced the availability of Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators on IBM Cloud. This offering delivers Intel Gaudi 3 in a public cloud environment for production workloads. Through this collaboration, IBM Cloud aims to help clients more cost-effectively scale and deploy enterprise AI. Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators on IBM Cloud are currently available in Frankfurt (eu-de) and Washington, D.C. (us-east) IBM Cloud regions, with future availability for the Dallas (us-south) IBM Cloud region in Q2 2025.

IBM's AI in Action 2024 report found that 67% of surveyed leaders reported revenue increases of 25% or more due to including AI in business operations. Although AI is demonstrating promising revenue increases, enterprises are also balancing the costs associated with the infrastructure needed to drive performance. By leveraging Intel's Gaudi 3 on IBM Cloud, the two companies are aiming to help clients more cost effectively test, innovate and deploy generative AI solutions. "By bringing Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerators to IBM Cloud, we're enabling businesses to help scale generative AI workloads with optimized performance for inferencing and fine-tuning. This collaboration underscores our shared commitment to making AI more accessible and cost-effective for enterprises worldwide," said Saurabh Kulkarni, Vice President, Datacenter AI Strategy and Product Management, Intel.

Today, AMD announced 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors power the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute E6 Standard shapes. 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors, the world's best server CPUs for enterprise, AI and cloud, enable OCI Compute E6 shapes to deliver up to a 2X increase in cost to performance, compared to the previous E5 instance generation based on testing by OCI.

The new OCI Compute E6 shapes build on the success of the previous E5 generation to deliver leadership performance and cost efficiency for general-purpose and compute-intensive workloads. These OCI shapes add to the selection of more than a thousand compute instances powered by AMD EPYC processors across all major cloud service providers.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for AI/ML, HPC, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing the availability of new single-socket servers capable of supporting applications that required dual-socket servers for a range of data center workloads. By leveraging a single-socket architecture, enterprises and data center operators can reduce initial acquisition costs, ongoing operational costs such as power and cooling, and reduce the physical footprint of server racks compared to previous generations of systems based on older processors.

"We are entering a new era of compute where energy-efficient and thermally optimized single-socket architectures are becoming a viable alternative to traditional dual-processor servers," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Our new single-socket servers support 100% more cores per system than previous generations and have been designed to maximize acceleration, networking, and storage flexibility. Supporting up to 500-watt TDP processors, these new systems can be configured to fulfill a wide range of workload requirements."

Bundle up - GeForce NOW is bringing a flurry of Blizzard titles to its ever-expanding library. Prepare to weather epic gameplay in the cloud, tackling the genres of real-time strategy (RTS), multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) and more. Classic Blizzard titles join GeForce NOW, including Heroes of the Storm, Warcraft Rumble and three titles from the Warcraft: Remastered series. They're all part of 11 games joining the cloud this week, atop the latest update for hit game Zenless Zone Zero from miHoYo.

Blizzard Heats Things Up
Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's unique take on the MOBA genre, offers fast-paced team battles across diverse battlegrounds. The game features a roster of iconic Blizzard franchise characters, each with customizable talents and abilities. Heroes of the Storm emphasizes team-based gameplay with shared experiences and objectives, making it more accessible to newcomers while providing depth for experienced players.

Supermicro, Inc. a Total IT Solution Provider for AI/ML, HPC, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is introducing a wide range of new systems which are fully optimized for edge and embedded workloads. Several of these new compact servers, which are based on the latest Intel Xeon 6 SoC processor family (formerly codenamed Granite Rapids-D), empower businesses to optimize real-time AI inferencing and enable smarter applications across many key industries.

"As the demand for Edge AI solutions grows, businesses need highly reliable, compact systems that can process data at the edge in real-time," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "At Supermicro, we design and deploy the industry's broadest range of application optimized systems from the data center to the far edge. Our latest generation of edge servers deliver advanced AI capabilities for enhanced efficiency and decision-making close to where the data is generated. With up to 2.5 times core count increase at the edge with improved performance per watt and per core, these new Supermicro compact systems are fully optimized for workloads such as Edge AI, telecom, networking, and CDN."

At Embedded World Germany, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced the entry into an agreement to acquire EdgeImpulse Inc., which will enhance its offering for developers and expand its leadership in AI capabilities to power AI-enabled products and services across IoT. The closing of this deal is subject to customary closing conditions. This acquisition is anticipated to complement Qualcomm Technologies' strategic approach to IoT transformation, which includes a comprehensive chipset roadmap, unified software architecture, a suite of services, developer resources, ecosystem partners, comprehensive solutions, and IoT blueprints to address diverse industry needs and challenges.

"We are thrilled about the opportunity to significantly enhance our IoT offerings with Edge Impulse's advanced AI-powered end-to-end platform that will complement our strategic approach to IoT transformation," said Nakul Duggal, group general manager, automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, and cloud computing, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "We anticipate that this acquisition will strengthen our leadership in AI and developer enablement, enhancing our ability to provide comprehensive technology for critical sectors such as retail, security, energy and utilities, supply chain management, and asset management. IoT opens the door for a myriad of opportunities, and success is about building real-world solutions, enabling developers and enterprises with AI capabilities to extract intelligence from data, and providing them with the tools to build the applications and services that will power the digital transformation of industries."

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, today announced Amazon GameLift Streams, a fully managed capability that enables developers to deliver high-fidelity, low-latency game experiences to players using virtually any device with a browser. Game developers no longer need to spend time and resources modifying their games for streaming or building their own streaming infrastructure. Players around the world can begin playing games in seconds instead of waiting minutes for streams or hours for downloads. Amazon GameLift Streams is a new capability of Amazon GameLift, the AWS service that empowers developers to build and deliver the world's most demanding games. The new streaming capability opens opportunities for developers to deliver new experiences to more players, helping them grow engagement and sales of their games.

"With more than 750 million people playing games running on AWS every month, we have a long history of supporting the industry's game development, content creation, player acquisition, personalization, and more," said Chris Lee, general manager and head of Immersive Technology at AWS. "Amazon GameLift Streams can help the game industry transform billions of everyday devices around the world into gaming machines without rebuilding game code or managing your own infrastructure. For game developers, this creates exciting new revenue and monetization opportunities that weren't possible before."

QNAP Systems, Inc. today released QuTScloud c5.2, the latest version of its Cloud NAS operating system. This update introduces Security Center, a proactive security application that monitors Cloud NAS file activities and defends against ransomware threats. Additionally, QuTScloud c5.2 provides extensive optimizations, streamlining operations and management for a more seamless user experience.

QuTScloud Cloud NAS revolutionizes enterprise data storage and management. By deploying a QuTScloud image on virtual machines, businesses can flexibly implement Cloud NAS on public cloud platforms or virtualization environments. With a subscription-based pricing model starting at just US $4.99 per month, users can allocate resources efficiently and optimize costs.

The telecommunications industry is undergoing a major transformation as AI and 5G technologies reshape networks and connectivity. While operators are eager to modernize infrastructure, challenges remain, such as high capital expenditures, security concerns and integration with legacy systems. At MWC 2025, Intel - alongside more than 50 partners and customers - will showcase groundbreaking solutions that deliver high capacity and high efficiency performance with built-in AI integration, eliminating the need for costly additional hardware and delivering optimized total cost of ownership (TCO).

"By leveraging cloud technologies and fostering close collaborations with partners, we are helping operators virtualize both 5G core and radio access networks - proving that the most demanding, mission-critical workloads can run efficiently on general-purpose silicon," said Sachin Katti, senior vice president and general manager of the Network and Edge Group at Intel Corporation. "Through our Xeon 6 processors, we are enabling the future of AI-powered network modernization."

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."