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Google caused two significant disruptions in the AI chip field last month. The first one was the release of its 7th generation tensor processing unit (TPU), codenamed Ironwood. The chips offered a significant improvement in inference processing, for which it was custom built. Ironwood also

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how providers are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update on the performance of cloud providers and ISPs. Note: We have archived prior-year outage updates, including our 2024 report,

Let’s face it, the last couple of months haven’t been great for the cloud. In October, both Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure had widely publicized, highly impactful failures. In November, a Cloudflare outage took down a big chunk of websites, effectively closing some businesses. I even had problems getting a haircut because the salon website was down with Cloudflare-itis and I couldn’t join a waitlist. Of course for ente

Nvidia has taken a strategic step deeper into the AI software stack with its acquisition of SchedMD, the developer of Slurm, a widely used open-source workload manager for high-performance computing and AI clusters. Slurm plays a central role in scheduling large, resource-intensive jobs across thousands of servers and GPUs, shaping how AI workloads are distributed in modern data centers. “Nvidia will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software, making it widely available to and supported by the broader HPC and AI community across diverse hardware and software environments,” Nvidia said in a blog post. The deal underscores Nvid

CISPE, the association of Cloud Infrastructure Providers in Europe, is continuing its legal fight to unwind Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, citing the harm it is doing to VMware customers. It has just filed a response in a case it brought before a top European Court earlier this year, seeking to annul a 2023 decision to approve the merger by the European Commission, the European Union’s antitrust authority. The Commission was one of numerous competition regulators around the world weighing in on the decision. “The Commission looked at thi

A cloud challenge that hampers many organizations is how to normalize billing data across disparate platforms that include multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure deployments. Enterprises are spending significant resources building custom integrations to reconcile cost data from different cloud providers, SaaS platforms and on-premises infrastructure. That’s the domain of FinOps, a practice that has gained traction in recent years. FinOps combines finance, operations and engineering teams to manage cloud and technology spending. Among the leading organizations in the movement is the FinOps Foundation,

Network engineers have spent decades working within rigid constraints. Your switch vendor decides what protocols you can use, what features you get, and when you get them. Need something custom? You’re out of luck. That’s changing, and P4 is a primary driver. P4 lets you program the data plane, the part of switches and SmartNICs that actually moves packets. This isn’t theoretical. Organizations are running P4 in production today, handling real traffic for applications that can’t wait years for vendor feature requests to materialize. If you’re planning network infrastructure for the next five to ten years, understanding P4 isn’t optional anymore.

Aetherflux says it will launch its first solar powered orbital data center satellite in the first quarter of 2027, joining SpaceX, Amazon, Google, and Starcloud in a race to move computing infrastructure off-planet as AI’s energy demands outpace terrestrial data center capacity. “Aetherflux’s first data center node for commercial use is targeted for Q1 2027; subsequent satellite launches will build a constellation of nodes to scale capacity,” Aetherflux said in an announcement of the project, dubbed “Galactic Brain.”

Oracle’s aggressive AI-driven data center build-out has pushed its free cash flow from a modest deficit of $2 billion in the quarter ended August 31 to a staggering $10 billion shortfall in the quarter ended November 30, creating structural financial pressure that could translate into higher subscription costs and stricter contract terms for customers, analysts say. “Oracle customers face a clear and escalating risk of price increases because the company has entered a capital cycle where spending has significantly outpaced monetization,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of Greyhound Research.

Nvidia has released new open-source software that gives data center operators deeper visibility into the thermal and overall health of its AI GPUs, aiming to help enterprises manage heat and reliability challenges as power-hungry accelerators push cooling systems to their limits. The update arrives as the industry weighs the growing impact of thermal stress on the lifespan and performance of modern AI hardware, making granular telemetry an increasingly important part of large-scale infrastructure planning. The new software gives operators a dashboard to monitor power use, utilization, memory bandwidth, airflow issues, and other key indicators across entire GPU fleets, helping