06/15/2025 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Top Supercomputers, AMD, Autonomous Network Operations, IonQ acquires Oxford Ionics
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
I’m trying to talk myself into going to the Yotta conference in September. The speaker lineup is absolutely incredible, the topics are a page right out of my ‘stuff to research’ pile, and practically all of the companies I follow are going to be there.
[Link] El Capitan Retains Top Spot in 65th TOP500 List as Exascale Era Expands. El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory remains the world’s fastest supercomputer, leading the 65th TOP500 list at ISC 2025. Built by HPE with AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, it scored 1.742 exaflops (HPL), 17.1 petaflops (HPCG), and 16.7 exaflops (HPL-MxP). Ranking 25th on the Green500 with 58.89 gigaflops/watt, it balances power and efficiency. El Capitan drives advancements in AI, national security, and scientific research.
[Link] Crusoe announced a strategic partnership with Polar to establish Crusoe’s first data center presence in mainland Europe. Crusoe has signed a contract for a 12 MW facility located in Norway, which will be powered entirely by 100% hydroelectric energy. Crusoe also secured a $750 million credit facility from Brookfield Asset Management.
[Link] AMD Plots Interception Course With Nvidia GPU And System Roadmaps. At the Advancing AI 2025 event in San Jose last week, AMD announced its end-to-end integrated AI platform vision and introduced its open, scalable rack-scale AI infrastructure built on industry standards. AMD noted that seven of the 10 largest model builders and Al companies are running production workloads on Instinct GPUs. Crusoe announced a collaboration with AMD that will combine the leading performance of AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs with Crusoe’s AI cloud platform to deliver a robust AI Infrastructure as a service offering.
Autonomous Network Operations
[Link] At the Cisco Live event last week Cisco announced Cisco AI Canvas, using AgenticOps to transform how NetOps, SecOps, and app teams solve problems fast. The team behind Canvas gives a demo of this solution built for the enterprise in this video.
[Link] Nile announced Nile Experience Intelligence (NXI), a breakthrough generative AI engine designed to proactively detect and resolve issues across enterprise networks—before users or IT teams ever notice them. By analyzing billions of telemetry events daily, NXI enables autonomous detection, real-time root cause analysis, and seamless resolution.
[Link] Google announced the Autonomous Network Operations framework — enabling Communication Service Providers to enhance service reliability, proactively detect and resolve network issues, and turn fragmented data into value. The framework leverages the latest in Google Cloud AI, infrastructure, and analytics products to understand and make sense of complex network data, risks, and operations.
[Link] Cisco is joining the more than 100 global members of EPRI's (Electric Power Research Institute) Open Power AI Consortium in innovating how electricity is generated, transmitted, and delivered to customers.
[Link] Qualcomm has announced the acquisition of Alphawave Semi, a leader in high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies, delivering IP, custom silicon, connectivity products, and chiplets. The implied enterprise value of the deal is approximately US$2.4 billion.
[Link] At its City Council meeting last week, the city of Hammond, Indiana approved a multi-billion-dollar development agreement between CoreWeave and Decennial for a new data center. Decennial Group, LLC, who built and still owns the current 105,000sf data center, will construct and own the new 450,000sf and 180 MW building on a 25-acre parcel.
[Link] Data Center Frontier: Transforming Data Center Energy: The Innovative FlexGen and Rosendin BESSUPS Collaboration. A partnership between FlexGen and Rosendin to develop a utility-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) will produce a system that integrates Rosendin's BESSUPS technology and FlexGen's Soft-Grid Interconnect & Island-Grid Frequency Stabilization technologies, and is managed by FlexGen's HybridOS energy management software.
[Link] Talen Energy and Amazon Web Services have signed a 17-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to supply AWS with 1.92GW of energy from the 2.5GW Susquehanna nuclear power plant.
[Link] The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) and Firmus Technologies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on the design, research and pilot testing of energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure utilising seawater-based thermal management systems. The two companies will jointly study advanced infrastructure concepts focused on reducing power and land requirements through the use of modular, liquid-cooled systems.
[Link] Amsterdam-based Nebius announced the first general availability of NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip capacity for customers in Europe, as it continues to build out full-stack AI infrastructure globally to accelerate AI innovation at scale.
[Link] IonQ to acquire Oxford Ionics for $1.075 billion. Oxford Ionics holds the current world records for fidelity, which measures the accuracy of quantum operations. The combined company expects to build systems with 256 physical qubits at accuracies of 99.99% by 2026 and advance to over 10,000 physical qubits with logical accuracies of 99.99999% by 2027.
[Link] China Ramps Up Photonic Chip (photonic chips, also known as photonic integrated circuits, are microchips that use light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) to process, transmit, and manipulate information) Production With Eye on AI and Quantum Computing. China has launched its first production line for thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic chips, which offer high bandwidth and low power consumption. The CHIPX chips exceed a modulation bandwidth of 110 gigahertz, a global performance barrier, and have significantly reduced signal losses, suggesting they can support advanced optical links with greater efficiency.
[Link] 🤯 Laser-Based Compute Promises To Light The Way To Faster Physics Sims. TLDR: the use of a laser-based compute platform called the Laser Processing Unit (LPU) developed by the Israeli startup LightSolver. The LPU is being explored by companies like Ansys to accelerate the solving of non-polynomial (NP-hard) equations commonly found in physics simulations and other high-performance computing workloads. LightSolver is working to scale up the LPU technology, aiming to have a 200-laser unit by 2027 and a 1,000-laser unit by 2029.
Follow me on X for more links and news.
Coinbase is the easiest (and best) place to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Use my referral link to sign up.