AMD and Meta’s Deal is One of the Most Significant AI Infrastructure Partnerships This Year, but Will It Deliver?

A professional woman with brown hair, wearing a black blazer and a teal top, against a light blue background.
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• On February 24, 2026, AMD and Meta announced a partnership to deploy AMD Helios racks, optimized for Meta’s workloads.

• The shipments, starting in H2 2026, will cover successive generations of silicon over several years and be equivalent to 6 gigawatts of power.

AMD and Meta are deepening their collaboration to align their GPU and CPU silicon, systems, and software roadmaps with Helios rack clusters running on ROCm software. As part of the agreement, AMD is also giving Meta warrants that could convert into a 10% stake in the company. Meta can only cash the warrants if it buys all the agreed chips, and AMD’s share price triples. For AMD it’s a massive validation of its AI computing roadmap and for the wider industry it has broad implications as it can mean lessening overreliance on a single supplier, potentially accelerating innovation. It gives Meta greater bargaining power as it gains pricing leverage and potentially reduces the risk of supply bottlenecks. In other words, Meta avoids being completely locked into NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

Continue reading “AMD and Meta’s Deal is One of the Most Significant AI Infrastructure Partnerships This Year, but Will It Deliver?”

Is Liquid Cooling the Key Now that AI Pervades Everything?

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• Data center cooling has become an increasingly insurmountable challenge because AI accelerators consume massive amounts of power.

• Liquid cooling adoption is progressively evolving from experimental to mainstream starting with AI labs and hyperscalers, then moving into the colocation space and later enterprises.

As Generative AI (GenAI) takes an ever-stronger hold in our lives, the demands on data centers continue to grow. The heat generated by the high-density computing required to run AI applications that are more resource-intensive than ever is pushing companies to adopt ever more innovative cooling techniques. As a result, liquid cooling, which used to be a fairly experimental technique, is becoming more mainstream.

Continue reading “Is Liquid Cooling the Key Now that AI Pervades Everything?”

Mistral AI’s Independence from US Companies Lends it a Competitive Edge

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• Mistral AI’s valuation went up to EUR11.7 billion after a funding round of EUR1.7 billion spearheaded by Netherlands-based ASML.

• The French company has the edge in open source and is well positioned to capitalize on the sovereign AI trend sweeping Europe right now.

Semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML and Mistral AI announced a partnership to explore the use of AI models across ASML’s product portfolio to enhance its holistic lithography systems. In addition, ASML was the lead investor in the latest funding round in the AI startup and now holds 11% share on a fully diluted basis in Mistral AI.

Continue reading “Mistral AI’s Independence from US Companies Lends it a Competitive Edge”

The EU is a Trailblazer, and the AI Act Proves It

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• On August 2, 2025, the second stage of the EU AI Act came into force, including obligations for general purpose models.

• The AI Act first came into force in February 2025, with the first set of applications built into law; the legislation follows a staggered approach with the last wave expected for August 2, 2027.

August 2025 has been marked by the enforcement of a new set of rules as part of the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI legislation, which is being implemented in gradual stages. Like GDPR was for data privacy in the 2010s, the AI Act will be the global blueprint for governance of the transformative technology of AI, for decades to come. Recent news of the latest case of legal action, this time against OpenAI, by the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who ended his life after months of intensive use of ChatGPT, has thrown into stark relief the potential for harm and the need to regulate the technology.

Continue reading “The EU is a Trailblazer, and the AI Act Proves It”

GPT-5 Has Had a Rocky Start but Remains an Extraordinary Achievement

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

  • OpenAI released GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, a multimodal large language model (LLM) with agentic capabilities.
  • This is the latest iteration of the famous chatbot, and the most important upgrade since the release of the previous generation, GPT-4, in 2023.

As it happens sometimes when a product is thrust with such force into the realm of popular culture, the release of GPT-5 sparked a veritable PR crisis, leading CEO Sam Altman to make a public apology and backtrack on the decision to remove access to all previous AI models in ChatGPT. Unlike enterprise customers, which received advanced warnings of such movements, consumer ChatGPT users did not know their preferred models would disappear so suddenly. The ensuing kerfuffle highlighted the strange co-dependency relationship that some people have developed with the technology, creating no end of background noise surrounding this momentous release.

Continue reading “GPT-5 Has Had a Rocky Start but Remains an Extraordinary Achievement”

Google Cloud Focuses on Agentic AI During UK Summit

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• The Google Cloud summit was held in London (England) on July 9-10, 2025. The company said there are now over seven million developers operating within Google Vertex AI Studio.

• The company has expanded into 42 cloud regions, adding that 90% of AI unicorns are running on Google Cloud.

Google Cloud highlighted a wealth of customer cases during the Google Cloud summit held in London on July 9-10, 2025. Google Cloud has a data center in Waltham Cross (England), which will be fully operational by end-2025 to provide British businesses with high-performance computing (HPC) services. Various new capabilities for agentic AI that are aligned with business needs were highlighted. This shows strong momentum, but there are a few considerations for Google Cloud to strengthen its position in the enterprise, such as the need for stronger skills in the area of consulting, for example.

Continue reading “Google Cloud Focuses on Agentic AI During UK Summit”

Advancing AI 2025 Event: AMD Heeds the AI Opportunity

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• AMD’s “Advancing AI 2025” event, held in San Jose, California (US) in June 2025 helped analysts delve deeper into the company’s strategy for the next few years.

• The chip designer aims to build a fully open ecosystem and stack, supported by a string of acquisitions, including Silo AI and Brium.

AMD continues executing upon its annual roadmap cadence since it launched the AMD Instinct MI300 GPUs in late-2023. The launch of the AMD Instinct MI350 series, with a quadruple jump in performance compared with the previous generation, was a highlight of the conference. As AI agents become conspicuous, compute requirements will grow, driving an exponential demand for infrastructure. AMD also focused on its software roadmap and highlighted the importance of an open ecosystem, something the company has invested in through acquisitions.

Continue reading “Advancing AI 2025 Event: AMD Heeds the AI Opportunity”

GenAI Startup CoreWeave Goes Public Amid Tumultuous IPO

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• CoreWeave’s IPO was the first time an AI startup went public since the beginning of the generative AI (GenAI) boom.

• The IPO market has been very slow against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment.

The data center operator CoreWeave made headlines as it went public last week. Its IPO, initially estimated to reach up to $32 billion, went down to $23 billion in the days prior to its stock market debut. CoreWeave rents out computing power to big tech companies building out large language models (LLMs). The company relies heavily on two major customers: Microsoft and OpenAI. The latter, alongside Nvidia, is a stakeholder in CoreWeave.

Continue reading “GenAI Startup CoreWeave Goes Public Amid Tumultuous IPO”

Generative AI Watch: At GTC 2025, NVIDIA Envisioned a World Beyond Large Language Models

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• NVIDIA believes enterprises are evolving from digital transformation driven by large language models (LLMs), and towards physical AI, or spatial AI, and multimodal AI.

• The industry at large is turning to “reasoning” models, capable of offering more analysis and autonomy than LLMs, especially combined with AI agents.

GTC is NVIDIA’s most important conference, focused on developers, who are the core of the AI market. This year, the event was held on March 17-21 in San Jose, California (US). NVIDIA believes that enterprises should be diversifying from purely digital transformation driven by LLMs, and towards physical AI or spatial AI, as well as multimodal AI, robotics, and AI at the edge. For this reason, the event tilted towards the industrial, automotive, and manufacturing sectors. The industry at large is turning to “reasoning” models, capable of offering more analysis and autonomy than LLMs, especially combined with AI agents. This transition should bring further demand for raw computing power, despite efficiency gains in terms of chipset architectures.

Continue reading “Generative AI Watch: At GTC 2025, NVIDIA Envisioned a World Beyond Large Language Models”

AWS Offers Deepseek-R1 on Amazon Bedrock as US Companies Embrace the Chinese Startup

B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

  • DeepSeek-R1 Distill Llama and Qwen models became available in Amazon Bedrock Marketplace and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart in February 2025.
  • DeepSeek-R1 became available as a fully managed, generally available, serverless model in Amazon Bedrock on March 10, 2025.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) just became the first cloud computing provider to offer DeepSeek-R1 as a fully managed, serverless large language model (LLM) in general availability on Amazon Bedrock, a service that provides access to third-party foundation models. The publicly available DeepSeek-R1 series has taken the generative AI (GenAI) market by storm, with its advanced reasoning capabilities and reduced computing costs, made possible thanks to an innovative architecture based on mixture of experts technologies.

Continue reading “AWS Offers Deepseek-R1 on Amazon Bedrock as US Companies Embrace the Chinese Startup”