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With its highly successful A100 and H100 processors for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, NVIDIA dominates AI datacenter deployments these days. But among large cloud service providers as well as emerging devices like software defined vehicles (SDVs) there is a global trend towards custom silicon. And, according to a report from Reuters, NVIDIA is putting together a new business unit to take on the custom chip market.

The new business unit will reportedly be led by vice president Dina McKinney, who has a wealth of experience from working at AMD, Marvell, and Qualcomm. The new division aims to address a wide range of sectors including automotive, gaming consoles, data centers, telecom, and others that could benefit from tailored silicon solutions. Although NVIDIA has not officially acknowledged the creation of this division, McKinneys LinkedIn profile as VP of Silicon Engineering reveals her involvement in developing silicon for 'cloud, 5G, gaming, and automotive,' hinting at the broad scope of her alleged business division.

Nine unofficial sources across the industry confirmed to Reuters the existence of the division, but NVIDIA has remained tight-lipped, only discussing its 2022 announcement regarding implementation of its networking technologies into third-party solutions. According to Reuters, NVIDIA has initiated discussions with leading tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, to investigate the potential for developing custom chips. This hints that NVIDIA intends to extend its offerings beyond the conventional off-the-shelf datacenter and gaming products, embracing the growing trend towards customized silicon solutions.

While using NVIDIA's A100 and H100 processors for AI and high-performance computing (HPC) instances, major cloud service providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft are also advancing their custom processors to meet specific AI and general computing needs. This strategy enables them to cut costs as well as tailor capabilities and power consumption of their hardware to their particular needs. As a result, while NVIDIA's AI and HPC GPUs remain indispensable for many applications, an increasing portion of workloads now run on custom-designed silicon, which means lost business opportunities for NVIDIA. This shift towards bespoke silicon solutions is widespread and the market is expanding quickly. Essentially, instead of fighting custom silicon trend, NVIDIA wants to join it.

Meanwhile, analysts are painting the possibility of an even bigger picture. Well-known GPU industry observer Jon Peddie Research notes that they believe that NVIDIA may be interested in addressing not only CSPs with datacenter offerings, but also consumer market due to huge volumes.

"NVIDIA made their loyal fan base in the consumer market which enabled them to establish the brand and develop ever more powerful processors that could then be used as compute accelerators," said JPR's president Jon Peddie. "But the company has made its fortune in the deep-pocked datacenter market where mission-critical projects see the cost of silicon as trivial to the overall objective. The consumer side gives NVIDIA the economy of scale so they can apply enormous resources to developing chips and the software infrastructure around those chips. It is not just CUDA, but a vast library of software tools and libraries."

Back in mid-2010s NVIDIA tried to address smartphones and tablets with its Tegra SoCs, but without much success. However, the company managed to secure a spot in supplying the application processor for the highly-successful Nintendo Switch console, and certainly would like expand this business. The consumer business allows NVIDIA to design a chip and then sell it to one client for many years without changing its design, amortizing the high costs of development over many millions of chips.

"NVIDIA is of course interested in expanding its footprint in consoles right now they are supplying the biggest selling console supplier, and are calling on Microsoft and Sony every week to try and get back in," Peddie said. "NVIDIA was in the first Xbox, and in PlayStation 3. But AMD has a cost-performance advantage with their APUs, which NVIDIA hopes to match with Grace. And since Windows runs on Arm, NVIDIA has a shot at Microsoft. Sony's custom OS would not be much of a challenge for NVIDIA."

The rest is here:
Report: NVIDIA Forms Custom Chip Unit for Cloud Computing and More - AnandTech

Microsoft has committed to investing 3.2 billion ($3.44bn) to double its AI infrastructure and cloud computing capacity in Germany.

The investment will span the next two years and focus on the expansion of Microsoft's cloud region in Frankfurt and newly planned infrastructure in North Rhine-Westphalia.

In total, this will double capacity in the country. Specific details about the development in North Rhine-Westphalia - a region of northwest Germany encompassing Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, and Dsseldorf - have not been shared.

We want to enable the German economy to benefit from AI in order to continue to expand its global leadership position in competitiveness, said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft.

He continued: We see increasing demand for AI applications in key economic sectors such as manufacturing, automotive, financial services, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, and medical technology. Because these industries are fundamentally changing due to economic change, it is important to equip companies in Germany with world-leading technology.

The company said the investment will increase the availability of Microsoft's cloud computing and AI services to small start-ups and large corporations, including their ability to develop and apply AI models.

The data centers will reportedly be 100 percent powered by renewable energy.

Microsoft announced plans to launch cloud regions in Germany in 2018, with the Germany West Central Azure region becoming widely available in early 2021. The cloud region, when announced, was hosted in three separate data centers. The company also has the Germany North Azure region, though this is listed as "not supported," and is paired with the West Central region.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said: Microsoft's billion-dollar investment in Germany announced today is very good news for Germany as a business location. Microsoft is thus promoting the necessary structural change in the Rhineland region, advancing the computing infrastructure in our country, and strengthening the German ecosystem around artificial intelligence. Such projects show how attractive the location and the trust of investors in Germany is.

In addition to expanding infrastructure in the country, Microsoft will teach digital skills to more than 1.2 million people in Germany by the end of 2025. Those training programs will focus on AI skills, and will include the first professional certificate for generative AI.

For this training, Microsoft is partnering with other organizations including the Federal Association of German Employers' Associations, Schaeffler, the DHL Group, and the ReDI School of Digital Integration.

See more here:
Microsoft to invest 3.2bn in doubling AI infrastructure and cloud capacity in Germany - DatacenterDynamics

By Gloria Mathias

Today

Yubi Group, Indias lending technology conglomerate, has leveraged Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run its co-lending platform across India.

With OCIs superior performance, enterprise security, high availability, low cost, and globally distributed cloud regions, Yubi can bridge the credit gap in India and facilitate scalability in the co-lending sector.

Yubi has partnered with 80% of Indian banks and over 150 NBFCs. With the co-lending sector in India set to hit more than $12 billion this year, Yubi needed to further enhance its co-lending platform with greater flexibility, scalability, security, and high-performance computing resources to handle increased disbursement volumes and capitalise on the rapidly growing market opportunity.

At Yubi, our mission is to enable prudent access to credit for Indian businesses with the help of our esteemed lending partners and fintechs, thereby accelerating financial inclusion in India, said Gaurav Kumar, Founder and CEO of Yubi Group of Companies. Transitioning to OCI marks a significant milestone, facilitating seamless scalability, enhanced performance, and the establishment of a multi-cloud environment to better serve our customers across India, anytime and anywhere. We opted for OCI due to its dual-region cloud strategy, anticipating over 25% cost savings from this migration. This move fortifies our stance to empower Indian entrepreneurs in funding their aspirations and bringing their innovations to life, he added.

Yubi will deploy OCI services such as Compute Virtual Machines (VMs), Object Storage, and OCI Database with PostgreSQL to gain flexible compute capacity for its large-scale and small development projects. Yubi will also benefit from high-performance computing and low-cost cloud storage options to improve the efficiency and productivity of its IT team. The migration to OCI will help Yubi combine open-source technology with OCI to significantly improve performance and lower costs.

Shailender Kumar, senior vice president and regional managing director, Oracle India and NetSuite JAPAC said, With OCI, Yubi will be able to improve the performance of its co-lending platform, gain greater control of the budget, reduce underused resources, and forecast spending more accurately. OCI will also help Yubi combine cloud services from multiple clouds to optimise cost, functionality, and performance.

Link:
Yubi chooses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to run its co-lending platform - IBS Intelligence

AWS recently highlighted Zurich Insurance Group's use of AWS Account Factory for Terraform, which enabled them to attain the desired performance parameters needed to facilitate the provisioning of more than 3000 accounts. Zurich Insurance Group streamlined its Cloud Adoption Strategy by using the Scalable Account Vending solution, automating the process of setting up new AWS environments easily.

In a blog post,Raffaele Garofalo, senior solutions architect, andJohn Duckmanton, senior cloud infrastructure architect at AWS, provided anoverview of the migration journey. In 2022, Zurich launched a multi-year initiative aimed at fast-tracking its digital transformation and innovation by moving 1,000 workloads, including essential insurance and SAP tasks to AWS.

The initiative further aimed to standardize reusable Terraform-prebuilt patterns and services, simplifying migration and enhancing reusability. Zurich's shift to self-service DevSecOps for infrastructure meant setting up DevSecOps environments in Azure DevOps and Terraform Cloud for workloads lacking them, thereby accelerating adoption. The Scalable Account Vending (SAV) solution made it easier and faster to set up AWS accounts using AWS Account Factory for Terraform. It also ensured a uniform process across different business units, reducing the effort needed for support and allowing everyone to use the best methods.

Submitting a single Jira Service Management request by the workload owner initiated the provisioning of the complete cloud workload environment, equipping it with all essential resources needed for migrating a workload to AWS. This comprehensive solution was deployed as infrastructure-as-code, managed through Zurich Insurance Groups standard Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline.

Source: How Zurich Insurance Group built their Scalable Account Vending process using AWS Account Factory for Terraform

The AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) operates by creating a new AWS account whenever a Terraform configuration request is submitted to its account request GIT repository. Each configuration request includes all necessary details and metadata to accurately categorize the AWS account within the appropriate organizational structure and assign it to the correct cost center.

The AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) adopts a GitOps methodology for the provisioning and initial setup of new AWS accounts with Terraform. It has processes for account creation and resource deployment in these accounts, utilizing global and account-specific customizations via Terraform modules. The modifications to these modules carry the risk of introducing errors that may affect accounts provisioned this way.

To minimize the above risk, Zurich Insurance Group adopted GitFlow. It involved a procedure of pull requests, reviews, and merges for modifying production configurations to prevent disruptive changes. Any changes undergo testing in lower-level environments before being rolled out to production.

We saw an engagingdiscussion on Reddit, where the tech community shared their insights and opinions on using the Account Factory for Terraform with AWS. One comment discussed themerits and potential challenges of undertaking the migration to AFT. Another discussion focused onunderstanding AFT's main goal, managing multiple accounts efficiently.

Streamlining into a single ITSM request, Zurich Insurance Group CCOE enhanced SLA and customer satisfaction, cut support time and effort, and fortified their AWS security through automated DevSecOps.Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the company specializes in life and P&C insurance.

The rest is here:
Zurich Insurance Group's Journey with Scalable Account Vending and AWS Account Factory for Terraform - InfoQ.com

In todays dynamic business landscape, organizations are constantly seeking innovative ways to drive efficiency, agility, and value. Among the transformative technologies reshaping business operations, cloud computing and data analytics stand out as powerful tools that, when leveraged effectively, can yield significant business value. By integrating these technologies strategically, businesses can unlock new opportunities for growth, streamline operations, and gain a competitive edge in the market.

Cloud computing offers organizations the flexibility to access computing resources on-demand, without the need for substantial investments in hardware and software infrastructure. This agility enables businesses to scale their operations rapidly in response to changing market demands, without the constraints of traditional IT environments. By migrating workloads to the cloud, organizations can streamline their operations, reduce downtime, and optimize resource utilization, leading to improved efficiency across the board.

In todays data-driven world, businesses are sitting on a goldmine of valuable information. Data analytics empowers organizations to extract actionable insights from vast volumes of data, enabling informed decision-making and driving business value. By leveraging advanced analytics techniques, such as machine learning and predictive modeling, businesses can identify trends, anticipate customer needs, and optimize processes for maximum efficiency. Furthermore, effective data governance and quality assurance practices ensure that insights derived from data analytics are accurate, reliable, and actionable.

Cloud FinOps, a practice focused on optimizing cloud spending and maximizing business value, plays a crucial role in ensuring that cloud investments deliver tangible returns. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and measuring the business impact of cloud transformations, organizations can quantify the value derived from their cloud investments. Cloud FinOps goes beyond cost savings to encompass broader metrics such as improved resiliency, innovation, and operational efficiency, providing a comprehensive view of the business value generated by cloud initiatives.

Cloud computing infrastructure provides organizations with the foundation they need to harness the power of data analytics at scale. By leveraging cloud-based platforms for big data processing and analytics, organizations can access virtually unlimited computing resources, enabling them to analyze large datasets quickly and efficiently. Additionally, cloud infrastructure offers built-in features for data protection, disaster recovery, and security, ensuring that sensitive information remains safe and secure at all times. Furthermore, the pay-as-you-go pricing model of cloud services allows organizations to optimize costs and maximize ROI on their infrastructure investments.

Cloud computing accelerates the pace of software development by providing developers with access to scalable resources and flexible development environments. By leveraging cloud-based tools and platforms, organizations can streamline the software development lifecycle, reduce time-to-market, and improve collaboration among development teams. Furthermore, cloud-based development environments enable developers to experiment with new ideas and technologies without the constraints of traditional IT infrastructure, fostering innovation and driving business growth.

In conclusion, cloud computing and data analytics represent powerful tools for driving business value in todays digital economy. By embracing these technologies and implementing sound strategies for their deployment, organizations can unlock new opportunities for growth, enhance operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge in the market. With the right approach, cloud computing and data analytics can serve as catalysts for innovation and transformation, enabling businesses to thrive in an increasingly data-driven world.

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Leveraging Cloud Computing and Data Analytics for Businesses - Analytics Insight