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Allbirds abandons clothes, pivots to "AI compute infrastructure"

The Hot Take: Interesting shift in markets....

If you know the name Allbirds, it's probably for the company's longstanding stated commitment to "sustainable shoes and apparel." Going forward, though, the corporate entity wants to be known for its "long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider." In a news release Wednesday morning, Allbirds announced that it has secured a $50 million convertible finance facility to help power this unexpected "pivot ... to AI compute infrastructure." If all goes to plan, the company will soon…

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Apple Shows Its Cards, Plans To Move The Production Of Its Upcoming Baltra ASIC In-House

The Hot Take: Apple can't compete so it's going the ASICs route from the looks of it.

Apple generally tries to keep its cards hidden, preferring a grand unveiling, replete with mega-flourishes, to a gradual trickle of information and unvarnished product launches. However, when you have a supply chain as expansive as Apple's, leaks abound nonetheless. And today, we've received a juicy tidbit regarding the tech giant's intentions for its upcoming ASIC, dubbed Baltra. Apple intends to move the production of its upcoming AI ASIC in-house According to a South Korean publication, Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) - a company that…

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Intel Unveils AI Texture Compression Cutting Memory Use by Up to 18x

The Hot Take: Google, Nvidia and not Intel all the suddenly make this amazing new tech at around the same time? Not buying it.

Intel is advancing texture compression techniques with its newly introduced Texture Set Neural Compression (TSNC) technology, a neural network-based approach designed to significantly reduce the size of texture assets used in modern graphics workloads.

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Nvidia AI tech claims to slash VRAM usage by 85% with zero quality loss — Neural Texture Compression demo reveals stunning visual parity between 6.5GB of memory and 970MB

The Hot Take: Interesting.

Nvidia has just demoed its Neural Texture Compression technique again at a GTC talk, where it showed VRAM usage dropping from 6.5 GB to just 970 MB in a scene. NTC uses a neural network to decompress textures instead of standard block-based compression, reducing texture size and VRAM usage while also improving final image quality.

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Intel Arc Pro B70 Outclasses NVIDIA’s RTX Pro 4000 In AI At Half The Cost, 50% More Memory

The Hot Take: We need more competition, AMD seems to be very quiet lately and might come out of no where with a beast but they haven't yet. So intel coming back in even to do an Ai bubble grab it still helps us all. Especially when that bubble pops.

Intel's Arc Pro B70 is designed to offer accessible local inference for AI users, delivering more memory at half the price of the competition. Intel Arc Pro B70 vs NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell: 32 GB vs 24 GB, $949 vs $1800, More AI Context, 2x Tokens Per Dollar So we talked about the unveiling of the Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics card in our other post, where we highlighted the specifications, availability, and prices of the product. The B70 is going to be the flagship Pro & AI product from Intel within its Arc Pro stack, and they have…

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US senators want to suspend Nvidia AI chip export licenses to China and its intermediaries — bipartisan letter to Commerce Dept says that Huang’s claims of no chip diversion ā€˜were contradicted by reporting available’

The Hot Take: Uh oh, Ai king looks to be in trouble.

U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.) told Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that he should suspend all active export licenses to China for Nvidia AI chips, saying that Nvidia's most advanced AI GPUs are being diverted into the country despite Jensen Huang's assurances.

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Microsoft and Nvidia launch AI partnership to speed up nuclear power plant permitting and construction — simulation tools and generative models could hasten historically lengthy processes

The Hot Take: Green New agenda doesn't fit in with Ai replacement of the plebes for sure. So they push us to Solar & Wind while they get viable power options for a bot?

Microsoft and Nvidia are joining forces to accelerate the construction of nuclear power plants for power-hungry AI data centers. The partnership combines generative AI, digital twin simulation, and Nvidia's Omniverse platform to streamline the nuclear lifecycle from permitting through operations.

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Nvidia admits one GPU to rule them all was a fairy tale

The Hot Take: Nvidia starting to feel the heat of competition and see those $ evaporate as they try other vendors.

Nvidia is preparing to launch a new chip designed to speed up AI responses, breaking with its long-running habit of flogging the same processor for every job. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is expected to unveil a chip focused on ā€œinferenceā€, meaning running models rather than training them. According to people familiar with the plans for GTC next week, the chip is the first new product to emerge from December’s $20bn deal to hire the founders of Groq, a start-up building ā€œlanguage processing unitsā€ tuned for high-speed answers to…

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SoftBank to build massive AI datacenter on former US nuclear weapons site

The Hot Take: Interesting place to put an Ai Data-Center, giving it's probably hardened against military attacks.

10GW server farm, 10GW of new generation, and $4.2bn grid upgrade. And someone else is paying for the uranium cleanup Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.…

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Samsung union votes to strike, risking Nvidia HBM4 supply disruption

The Hot Take: Only going to shoot costs up on Ai accelerators and RAM or Samsung Chips.

Samsung Electronics' labor union has voted overwhelmingly to initiate dispute proceedings following a breakdown in wage negotiations, raising concerns over potential disruptions to the supply of HBM4 memory for Nvidia's next-generation AI accelerators.

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