02/09/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Meta, NVIDIA/CoreWeave, HyperSCALE, semiAnalysis, AI, Quantum Computing
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] Communications of the ACM: Meta’s planetary-scale infrastructure. Amazing article with a detailed analysis of the hyperscale infrastructure that powers all things Meta. Open Compute, open source software, development systems, infrastructure topology, the vision of “all global datacenters as a computer”, hardware and software co-design, in-house hardware design, and so much more.
[Link] CoreWeave launches the first NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-cloud based instances. CoreWeave has become 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.
[Link] I’ve followed the semiAnalysis company/site for a while now - and was ecstatic to see Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert on the Lex Fridman podcast. They talked about project Stargate, gigawatt-scale data centers, and programming things like “PyTorch.powerplant no blow up equals 0 or equal 1”. A mere 5-hour interview where they discuss DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters.
[Link] liad, the French telecoms group, announced a €3 billion ($3.10 billion) investment in AI infrastructure, focusing on data centers and computing power. Its subsidiary OpCore, which operates Iliad’s 13 data centers, will manage the investment. OpCore plans to deploy several hundred megawatts of capacity in the short-term, with a long-term goal of expanding to several gigawatts across Europe.
[Link] Google Team Combines Digital Precision and Analog Power to Unlock New Possibilities in Quantum Computing. Google researchers have used a 69-qubit hybrid digital-analog quantum simulator to study how quantum systems evolve toward thermal equilibrium. The study, published in Nature, revealed deviations in the Kibble-Zurek model, which predicts system changes during phase transitions.
[Link] Quantum AI Breakthrough with Massive Commercial Potential. Quantinuum announced a groundbreaking Generative Quantum AI framework (Gen QAI) – leveraging unique quantum-generated data to enable commercial applications in areas ranging from the development of new medicines, precise predictive modeling of financial markets, and real-time optimization of global logistics and supply chains.
Roundup - Big data centers, big power, big demand….
[Link] GenAI is generating monster cloud growth
[Link] Bloom Energy: Data Centers Are Turning to Onsite Power Sources to Address 35 GW Energy Gap by 2030.
[Link] Southeastern US utilities to add 20GW of natural gas by 2040 to meet data center demand.
[Link] Visual Capitalist: Ranked: Google’s Thirstiest Data Centers. Council Bluffs, Iowa - 980 million gallons of water in 2023.
[Link] Worldwide data center capex is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2029.
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