NAND Flash suppliers' Clients in the data center segment were gradually stepping up enterprise SSD procurement after finishing inventory adjustments, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Moreover, the adoption rate of 4/8 TB products in the enterprise SSD market increased substantially on account of the releases and adoption of the new server processor platforms from Intel and AMD. Although the recent wave of COVID-19 outbreaks that struck Southeast Asia weakened smartphone sales in 2Q21, the quarterly total NAND Flash bit shipments rose by nearly 9% QoQ, as PC OEMs still had plenty of component orders in 2Q21 due to the fairly robust notebook demand during the period. On the other hand, the shortage of controller ICs became more severe during the period, and the winter storm that battered Texas this February affected the operation of Samsung's foundry fab Line S2 in Austin. As demand for NAND Flash products rose, the overall ASP also rose by nearly 7% QoQ, and the quarterly total NAND Flash revenue rose by 10.8% QoQ to US$16.4 billion in 2Q21.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported record revenue for the second quarter ended August 1, 2021, of $6.51 billion, up 68 percent from a year earlier and up 15 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company's Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.94, up 276 percent from a year ago and up 24 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.04, up 89 percent from a year ago and up 14 percent from the previous quarter.

"NVIDIA's pioneering work in accelerated computing continues to advance graphics, scientific computing and AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Enabled by the NVIDIA platform, developers are creating the most impactful technologies of our time - from natural language understanding and recommender systems, to autonomous vehicles and logistic centers, to digital biology and climate science, to metaverse worlds that obey the laws of physics.

Kingston, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced the availability of the DC1500M, a U.2 data center NVMe PCIe SSD for mixed-use workloads. Leveraging a high-performance Gen 3.0 x4 PCIe NVMe design, the DC1500M delivers predictable random IO performance as well as predictable latencies over a wide range of workloads.

"DC1500M adds support for multiple namespaces making it ideal for environments including virtualisation and web hosting," said Tony Hollingsbee, SSD business manager, Kingston EMEA. "From high-performance cloud services, media capture and transport to a range of big-data applications, DC1500M sets the standard for applications where QoS and predictability of performance are paramount. Data centers need drives that are reliable, have serviceable form factors and are equipped with the enterprise-grade features that make it easier to maintain SLAs."

When solid state drives were first manufactured, they were designed using form factors similar to hard disk drives. But, because they are made from flash memory, SSDs can be designed in various form factors that best take advantage of the unique needs of respective client, hyperscale and enterprise compute environments. The form factor that is best suited for rack storage over the current industry-standard M.2 drive is the E1.S, according to experts at Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller integrated circuits and storage solutions. Phison's own E1.S SSD with the world's highest capacity storage is coming to market soon.

When first released, the M.2 form factor was popular in hyper-scale data centers due to its small size, low-cost structure, flexibility and scalability of multiple drives per server. But the M.2 form factor is not hot-pluggable and typically a challenge to service with the SSD installed on an internal motherboard socket. The M.2 form factor dimensions are also not ideal to fully utilize the space available in a 1U rack height (1.75") for storage capacity.

TAITRA (Taiwan External Trade and Development Council) announced today that NVIDIA will be delivering a keynote, entitled "The Transformational Power of Accelerated Computing, from Gaming to the Enterprise Data Center" at COMPUTEX 2021 Hybrid. Jeff Fisher, Senior Vice President of NVIDIA's GeForce Business Unit, will present on June 1 at 1:00 pm Taiwan time on the massive opportunities that GeForce PC gaming represents for the Taiwan ecosystem.

Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA, will then address "The Coming Democratization of AI." He will share three shifts driving this trend and explain how enterprises that embrace them can thrive in the coming years.

AMD has registered the steepest single-quarter growth in server CPU sales in 15 years, for Q1-2021, according to Mercury Research data accessed by Tom's Hardware. "While we don't often discuss average selling prices, we note that this quarter saw unusually strong price moves for AMD -- as AMD shipped fewer low-end parts and more high-end parts, as well as shipping many more server parts, the company's average selling price increased significantly," said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. Unfortunately, the growth in its EPYC server CPU sales also coincides with a drop in notebook CPU sales. It's also interesting to note here that AMD's Q1-2021 performance with server CPUs also coincides with a 20% drop in revenue for its Data Center Group, the business unit responsible for sales of its Xeon server processors.

Western Digital Corp. (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal third quarter 2021 financial results. "We reported solid results above the guidance range, driven by increasing momentum of our energy-assisted drives and our second-generation NVMe enterprise SSDs, improving NAND flash pricing trends, along with the continued accelerated digital transformation across end markets," said David Goeckeler, Western Digital CEO.

"Western Digital's strengths in technology and cost leadership, expansive product portfolio and broad routes to market are providing a foundation upon which we are solidifying our position as an essential building block of the digital economy. These strengths, combined with our increased operational and strategic focus enabled by our new business unit structure, are driving results. As we continue to face a dynamic environment, we are seeing the benefits of the synergistic value in the breadth of Western Digital's portfolio, and our unique ability to deliver both hard drive and flash solutions to our diverse end-markets and customer base."

NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU, its next-generation data processing unit, to deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities available for data centers.

The first DPU built for AI and accelerated computing, BlueField-3 lets every enterprise deliver applications at any scale with industry-leading performance and data center security. It is optimized for multi-tenant, cloud-native environments, offering software-defined, hardware-accelerated networking, storage, security and management services at data-center scale.

Microsoft employees are trialing a novel new immersive cooling system for their data center servers involving boiling liquid. Microsoft has looked to this two-phase closed-loop system as a solution to increasing power requirements from components. The cooling system features large vats where servers are submerged in a specially designed fluid from 3M which is harmless to electronics and boils at just 50°C (122°F). The heat from the servers is transferred to the fluid which boils and carries the heat away without any risk of overheating. The vats each contain a condenser that comes in contact with the gas cooling it down into a liquid and falling back into the loop. Microsoft claims that this new cooling approach will improve efficiency and sustainability through increased utilization of resources.

Addressing the demands of the modern data center, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced a range of new data center products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.

Today's most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) today announces that Toshiba, a committed technology leader, led all HDD companies in year-on-year Nearline HDD average capacity growth in 2020. Toshiba followed up an astounding 55% year-on-year growth in 2019 with an impressive 35% year-on-year growth in 2020 to lead the industry for a second consecutive year, according to TRENDFOCUS, Inc.'s data.

"Toshiba has done an admirable job of leveraging its industry-first 9-disk helium design to introduce competitive Nearline HDD products in a timely fashion. This has been the cornerstone in the company's ability to launch higher capacity Nearline HDD programs," stated John Chen, Vice President at TRENDFOCUS, Inc. "Toshiba's 9-disk helium-sealed HDD platform has enabled the company to achieve the highest five-year Compound Annual Growth Rates for Nearline HDD Units, Exabytes, and Average Capacity shipped through 2020."

Proliferation of digital content being created and replicated has led to an explosive growth of data centers around the world. Demand for storage has fueled HDD Exabyte growth, and for the first time in 2020, HDD Exabyte shipments topped 1ZB¹ across all storage applications, from edge to core. The meteoric climb in capacity shipped is a testament to the HDD industry's ability to deliver the most cost-effective and performance delivering storage medium in the market.

Western Digital Corp. (Nasdaq: WDC) today reported fiscal second quarter 2021 financial results. "The team delivered solid results this quarter, especially as we continue adapting our business and technology portfolio to take advantage of the immense opportunities in the storage industry," said, David Goeckeler, Western Digital CEO. "During the quarter, we captured strength in the retail business and also delivered on our target outcome to complete qualification of our energy-assisted hard drives and second-generation enterprise SSD products with some of the world's largest data center operators. While there is still more work to be done, we remain extremely focused on meeting the needs of our customers and ramping our next-generation products throughout calendar 2021."

In the fiscal second quarter of 2021, Western Digital's revenue decreased 7% year-over-year to $3.9 billion. The decrease is largely attributable to a decline in our Data Center Devices & Solutions end market, more than offsetting growth in Client Devices and Client Solutions.

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, today announced its upcoming NVMe SSD roadmap at the all-digital CES 2021. Although we adopt a new format this year, Kingston will bring its industry-leading SSDs to the forefront for attendees to experience virtually.

"Now that CES is moving online, we have a greater opportunity to connect with new and existing tech communities around the world," said Louis Kaneshiro, director of the SSD product engineering division, Kingston. "CES is the best time to share what's next from Kingston and we are very excited to launch our first Gen 4.0 NVMe SSDs as well as an external drive this year. When it comes to NVMe, we will have all customer segments covered from consumers to prosumers to data centers."

GPU supply has been one of the most interesting things this year. With a huge demand for the new GPU generations like NVIDIA's Ampere and AMD's RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards, everyone is trying to grab a card for themselves. Besides the huge demand, there is also a big problem. The supply of these GPUs is just too low to satisfy the demand, driving up the prices, and increasing the scarcity of them. Companies like NVIDIA have their priorities set: all of the major production will go for the data center expansion and data center customers. However, even that plan is proving not to be good enough.

The scarcity of GPUs has now hit data centers, with NVIDIA unable to satisfy the demand for its A100 GPUs designed for high-performance computing. "It is going to take several months to catch up some of the demand," said Ian Buck, vice president of Accelerated Computing Business Unit at Nvidia. That is an indicator of just how huge the demand for these accelerators is. With the recent company announcement of A100 GPU with 80 GB memory, partners expect to have the first cards in their systems in the first half of 2021. That means that this situation and inadequate supply will hopefully resolve sometime around that timeframe.

Today, at Intel Labs Day, Intel highlighted industry-leading technological advances toward the realization of the company's long-standing vision of integrating photonics with low-cost, high-volume silicon. The advancements represent critical progress in the field of optical interconnects, which address growing challenges around the performance scaling of electrical input/output (I/O) as compute-hungry data workloads increasingly overwhelm network traffic in data centers. Intel demonstrated advances in key technology building blocks, including miniaturization, paving the way for tighter integration of optical and silicon technologies.

"We are approaching an I/O power wall and an I/O bandwidth gap that will dramatically hinder performance scaling. The rapid progress Intel is making in integrated photonics will enable the industry to fully re-imagine data center networks and architectures that are connected by light. We have now demonstrated all of the critical optical technology building blocks on one silicon platform, tightly integrated with CMOS silicon. Our research on tightly integrating photonics with CMOS silicon can systematically eliminate barriers across cost, power and size constraints to bring the transformative power of optical interconnects to server packages." -James Jaussi, senior principal engineer and director of PHY Lab, Intel Labs.

Marvell today unveiled the industry's first 112G 5 nm SerDes solution that has been validated in hardware. The DSP-based SerDes boasts industry-leading performance, power and area, helping to propel 112G as the interconnect of choice for next generation 5G, enterprise, and cloud data center infrastructure. Marvell has recently secured a new custom ASIC design win customer that will embed this new IP to build next generation top-of-rack (ToR) and spine switches for leading hyperscale data centers around the world. The Marvell 5 nm SerDes solution doubles the bandwidth of current systems based on 56G while enabling the deployment of 112G I/Os in many exciting new applications, including network and data center switching, network traffic management, machine learning training and inference, and application-specific accelerators.

Today's news, which comes on the heels of the company's announcement with TSMC of its 5 nm portfolio, further strengthens Marvell's leading data infrastructure offerings in the industry's most advanced process geometry. The 112G 5 nm SerDes solution is part of Marvell's industry-leading IP portfolio that addresses the full spectrum of infrastructure requirements and includes processor subsystems, encryption engines, system-on-chip fabrics, chip-to-chip interconnects, and a variety of physical layer interfaces.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced another significant technological contribution to cloud data center infrastructures. Today, the company expanded its broad portfolio of client, enterprise and data center SSDs with the addition of the XD6 Series. KIOXIA's E1.S form factor XD6 SSDs are the first Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S SSDs to address the specific requirements of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the Open Compute Platform (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD Specification.

Designed to maximize system density, efficiency and simplicity, KIOXIA's EDSFF E1.x SSDs represent the future of flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the flexible, efficient, small form factor E1.S replaces the M.2 form factor and delivers greater density, performance, reliability, and thermal management. E1.S is also designed to be hot pluggable for increased serviceability, which is another benefit over M.2.

Lenovo Group (HKSE: 992) (PINK SHEETS: LNVGY) today announced record Group revenue in the second quarter of US$14.5 billion, up 7% year-on-year and with all businesses showing strong growth. Profit showed even stronger growth, with record pre-tax income of US$470 million, up 52% compared to the same quarter a year earlier, while net income also increased by 53% year-on-year to a record US$310 million. In addition to record quarterly results, Lenovo's financial strength and sustainability has been further validated recently with strong inaugural investment grade ratings from Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, and a successful global notes offering. Basic earnings per share for the second quarter were 2.59 US cents or 20.08 HK cents. Lenovo's Board of Directors declared an interim dividend of 6.6 HK cents per share.

"Our record results this quarter reflect our ongoing commitment to meeting the needs of the rapidly growing work-, learn-and play-from-home economy. All of our core businesses delivered year-on-year growth, while our Software and Services revenue grew to a new record," said Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo Chairman and CEO. "As the world continues to adjust to the "new normal," we are confident in the long-term growth potential of both devices and cloud infrastructure. We will continue to leverage our core competences of operational excellence and global/local footprint, while accelerating our service-led transformation to better grasp opportunities and drive sustainable growth."

NVIDIA today announced a new kind of processor—DPUs, or data processing units—supported by DOCA, a novel data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture that enables breakthrough networking, storage and security performance.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the company's three-year DPU roadmap in today's GPU Technology Conference keynote. It features the new NVIDIA BlueField -2 family of DPUs and NVIDIA DOCA software development kit for building applications on DPU-accelerated data center infrastructure services.

NUVIA, a leading-edge silicon design company, today announced the close of its Series B funding round, raising $240M. The funding round was led by Mithril Capital in partnership with Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai (founders of Marvell Technology Group), funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC., and Temasek, with additional participation from Atlantic Bridge, Redline Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC and WRVI Capital. The closure of NUVIA's Series B round builds on a $53M Series A round, raised in November 2019. NUVIA was founded in February 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams, with the vision to create the world's leading server processor.

Microsoft has announced it considers the result of its underwater data center initiative, named Project Natick, a success. This announcement comes after Microsoft recovered its data center capsule from the seafloor alongside the Orkney Islands after a two-year-long deployment. The self-contained server pod (made up of 12 racks and 864 servers) was filled with nitrogen, and achieved a much lower failure rate - component-wise - compared to traditional onshore data centers. In fact, its failure rate was one-eight that of traditional servers. The absence of oxygen and lower humidity levels (no need to keep air comfortable and breathable for human technicians) may have been deciding factors in this failure rate.

There are some obvious advantages from such an offshore server deployment. For one, all that cold water really helps in cooling down the components inside - there's no need for added expense in cooling solutions. There is also no need for land acquisition or infrastructure development that's typically associated with onshore server sites. The fact that Project Natick was fully powered by renewable energy sources, courtesy of the Orkneys' grid - supplied 100 percent by wind, solar, and experimental green technologies under development at the European Marine Energy Centre. considering its success, it can certainly be expected that Microsoft - and other companies - double down on this type of server deployment.

Thanks to the latest reportings from DigiTimes, we have obtained information that Apple has been working on expanding its data centers. According to Taiwan's server upstream supply chain, Apple has increased orders for its data centers, which have been growing starting from the second quarter of 2020. For the full year 2020, the orders are expected to be doubled, and the growth in purchasing is going to continue well into 2021. This purchasing decision from Apple comes after strong demand for its services like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV, App Store, etc., all of which have millions of users. Being that Apple is expanding its data centers, that must represent a sign that Apple's user base is continuing to grow strongly.

Phison Electronics , the industry's leader in NAND flash controllers and storage solutions, announces availability of the world's first 15.36 TB QLC customizable Enterprise SSD solution based on Phison's S12DC controller. Phison provides its customers with industry leading SSDs that are customized to their needs by leveraging Phison's firmware, controller, PCBA design, and manufacturing. The S12DC QLC SSD is an ideal storage solution by delivering higher performance, lower power consumption, and greater rack storage density for read intensive storage applications that currently source hard disk drives.

NVIDIA on Wednesday posted its Q2 Fiscal Year 2021 financial results, and the most startling result has been a breakdown of the company's $3.86 billion quarterly revenue among its various businesses. Turns out, that Data Center, and not Gaming, is NVIDIA's largest revenue generator for the quarter. Growing 54 percent over the previous quarter, this division contributed $1.74 billion, as opposed to $1.65 billion from Gaming (up 24 percent QoQ). The Gaming business includes NVIDIA's GeForce line of discrete graphics solutions and the GeForce NOW cloud gaming service.

Much of the growth in revenues for the Data Center business is attributable to the addition of revenues by Mellanox - a network infrastructure company NVIDIA acquired, and adoption of NVIDIA's new A100 Tensor Core GPUs by several new supercomputer projects focused on AI. NVIDIA's scalar processors now power 2/3rds of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today is announcing a partnership with German based Northern Data AG, one of the world's largest providers of High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions, to develop distributed computing in Northern Data's data centers. These data centers with GIGABYTE built HPC servers will be located in the Nordics and managed by Northern Data.

GIGABYTE has more than 30 years of engineering expertise and success stories in the development and production of server solutions that cover a myriad of uses from AI servers to GPU dense servers to scientific computing servers and more. The success that GIGABYTE's servers and workstations have had attributes to the quality and resiliency inherent in the development of manufacturing processes, while also listening to customer needs to produce best-fit solutions.