Hardware

The globe’s growing AI infrastructure requires huge amounts of electricity, possibly more than power providers can generate responsibly. Could AI models suck energy resources dry?

Major AI companies plan to meet the growing demand with nuclear energy.

Malaysia’s location, natural resources, and investor-friendly government are perfect for data centers, turning part of the country into an AI-fueled boomtown.

SambaNova raised the speed limit for access to the largest model in the Llama 3.1 family — and it’s free.

Nvidia’s latest chip promises to boost AI’s speed and energy efficiency.

An upstart chip company dramatically accelerates pretrained large language models. Groq offers cloud access to Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral.ai’s Mixtral at speeds an order of magnitude greater than other AI platforms. Registered users can try it.

Huawei is emerging as an important supplier of AI chips. Amid a U.S. ban on exports of advanced chips to China, demand for Huawei’s AI chips is so intense that the company is limiting production of the chip that powers one of its most popular smartphones so it can serve the AI market.

The AI boom is taxing power grids and pushing builders of data centers to rethink their sources of electricity.

ChatGPT is pitching in on the assembly line. Siemens and Microsoft launched a joint pilot program of a GPT-powered model for controlling manufacturing machinery. German automotive parts manufacturer Schaeffler is testing the system in its factories, as is Siemens itself. 

A new cloud-computing company promises to provide scarce AI processing power to startups and researchers. Voltage Park, a nonprofit north of Silicon Valley, will offer processing power from 24,000 top-of-the-line Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs)...

The state of California pulled the parking brake on Cruise driverless vehicles. The DMV suspended Cruise’s permit to operate vehicles in the state without safety drivers. The General Motors subsidiary responded by halting its robotaxi operations across the United States.

Nvidia’s top-of-the-line chips are in high demand and short supply. There aren’t enough H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) to meet the crush of demand brought on by the vogue for generative AI, VentureBeat reported.

TinyML shows promise for bringing deep learning to applications where electrical power is scarce, processing in the cloud is impractical, and/or data privacy is paramount.

Chinese companies have found loopholes to sidestep United States limits on AI chips. Facing severe limits on U.S. exports of high-performance chips, Chinese AI firms are purchasing them through subsidiaries and using them through cloud services, the Financial Times reported.

A new computing cluster delivers more bang per chip. Cerebras unveiled Andromeda, a supercomputer based on its processors. Unlike conventional clusters, the system’s processing speed rises linearly with additional processors.